LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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I'NITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



CLUB ESSAYS. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 



Motives of Life. 

16rno, Price , . £1.00. 

Truths for To-day; First Series, 

Fifteen- Selected Sebmons. 

12mo, Black and Gilt. Trice, $L50. 

Truths for To-day ; Second Series, 

Fifteen Selected Sermons. 

12mo, Black and Gilt. Price, S1.50. 



McClurg dr 3 Co., Publishers, Chicago. 



Club Essays. 



BY 



DAVID SWING. 






/toyo 



CHICAGO: 
Jansen, McClurg, & Company. 

1881. , 






COPYRIGHT. 

JANSBN, McCLURG & CO. 
A. D. 1880. 



TO THE 

CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB 



THESE ES SAYS 

ARE RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, 

BY THE AUTH O E. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 
I. 

AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER, . .11 

II. 
A ROMAN HOME, .... 45 

III. 

PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? . . .89 

IV. 

THE HISTORY OF LOVE, . . .127 

V. 

THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS, . 161 



n 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER 



CLUB ESSAYS 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 

The medical profession has long wished 
that the outer walls of some one human body 
at least might be made transparent, that those 
who attempt to cure ailments might be first 
permitted to see how the harp is made which 
they must keep in tune. Accidents have come 
to answer some part of this prayer, for pieces 
of the skull have been removed and the brain 
made visible, and the tearing away of the con- 
cealing veils have disclosed the throbbing heart 
and the expanding lungs. In the mental de- 
partment of man the operations are behind 
heavy canopies and are largely unseen, and 
the wish of the medical leaders has often come 
to the students of spiritual modes, and mo- 

(ii) 



12 CLUB ESSAYS. 



tions and aims and ends. Burns thought 
much good would result if a man could 
see himself even as well as other people could 
see him ; a Greek philosopher gratified a gen- 
eral feeling when he sighed forth the advice, 
" Know thyself," while Menander laughed at 
the imperfection of the advice, and declared it 
a more important attainment if one could 
know other people. " Murder will out," but 
this is not true of all the good and bad of 
human nature. Each soul lives and dies 
alone. It dwells in a dark room which no one 
enters. Saint Augustine comes nearest of all 
the great men of history to having lived and 
died in a transparent tenement. His soul tore 
down the heavy curtains and stood forth in 
full view. He saw himself in a manner so 
thorough that Burns himself must have felt 
that in our earth there was one man for whom 
his couplets were not composed. 

Great as is the public aversion to an egotist, 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 13 

each age is fortunate if it possesses one or two 
of these self-exhibitors, provided always that 
the man who thus loves to exhibit himself has 
any mental goods worthy of being spread out 
at an " opening." Even in so prosaic and 
practical a matter as a county fair, a public 
display of produce and stock and manufac- 
tured articles implies the superior quality of 
the things shown ; and when the exposition 
is a National cne held at Paris or at Nov- 
gorod, it is assumed that all the fabrics and 
jewels and wonders are of a very high order 
of merit. When an egotist comes along to 
set forth his own deeds and thoughts and be- 
liefs, to put his own exploits in a magic lantern, 
and throw them out upon a canvass for our ben- 
efit, he in the meanwhile making the accom- 
panying remarks and turning out the music, 
it is demanded simply that he has some ex- 
ploits and scenes worthy of his time and our 
own, and of the complicated machines for ex- 



M CLUB ESSAYS. 



hibiting. Fortunate the generation which has 
grown for its own use one of these s;las3-clear 
souls, having at once an experience rich and 
full, and an anxiety to tell the whole story. 
Montaigne is to-day a picture of a French 
half century — a picture made up of interest- 
ing details, which must have escaped the more 
grave historian ; but more fortunate still was 
the fourth Christian century in the possession 
of such an open mind as Aurelius Augustine. 
He alleges as an excuse for writing his 
" Confessions " his desire to do good ; but it is 
pretty well known that such a desire generally 
springs up in hearts not averse to self-utter- 
ance, and that the two desires of saving souls 
and pleasing one's self are for the most part 
combined in all these personal records. But 
snd justified the means, for in this autobiog- 
raphy the nineteenth century possesses a 
truthful picture of the Christian landscape as 
it lay fourteen hundred years ago. Doctrines 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 15 

and customs, smiles and tears, mothers, wives 
and mistresses, studies and prayers, truths 
and falsehoods, chimeras and absurdities and 
verities, are clothed with all the realism and 
interest which attend the drama of actual per- 
sonage. Augustine possesses the double virtue 
of being the mirror of a whole generation, and 
of a generation so far removed from our own 
that each article displayed seems an antique 
or a charming novelty. 

It shows the religious quality of the early 
Christian faith that Augustine's autobiograj)hy 
is addressed to God. In those days the Deity 
had not fallen into the hands of our Darwins 
and Mills and Harriet Martineaus, but He 
was a near friend — a companion of each soul. 
God was as absolute a reality as was the city 
of Eome or the Mediterranean sea, and the 
early Christians enjoyed as many conferences 
with God as they enjoyed with each other. 
To this real but invisible One cases of con- 



16 CLUB ESSAYS. 



science and of doubt were referred as to a mag- 
istrate who could not err, and, in a word, the 
Creator of the universe was the special friend 
and confidant of all who passed over from the 
|3agan to the Christian faith. When Augus- 
tine had fallen into deep perplexity over a 
question of duty, he resolved to oj)en the Bible 
at random and then mark what verse the 
Lord should first disclose to his eyes. Thus 
was he led from his darkness out into the su- 
preme light, and so effective was this form of 
appeal that both Augustine and his bosom 
friend Alypius were richly blessed by a pas- 
sage which contained a peculiar teaching for 
each one of the inseparable companions. 
That is, the appeal to ' random' was so full of 
success that the applicant had light to spare to 
his neighbor. Living in such a period, good 
Christians talked to God as they walked along 
the roads or as they journeyed by boat or 
litter, and when the subject of this sketch felt 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 



that the human family should see his inmost 
heart, he simply began to write down his talks 
with his Maker. This evidently secures for 
the book great sincerity and frankness, for there 
is seldom a heart so depraved that it can ad- 
dress a series of falsehoods to the Almighty, 
The probability is that in these " Confessions " 
we have a picture of a heart in the fourth 
century, as it lived and loved and hated and 
wept. It smiled but little. 

Should any modern mind po?sess the child- 
like simplicity that would tell all things to 
the public, we should have a grotesque collec- 
tion, for thoughts are largely involuntary, and 
they come pell-mell, red, white and blue and 
black and gray. Judgment selects from this 
•awful mixture and chaos a few things that 
seem worthy of utterance. Clergymen while 
speaking in the pulpit have their own thoughts 
about certain toilets and faces down in the 

pews, and along with their argument, that 

2 



IS CLUB ESSAYS. 



might seem to prove the existence of heaven 
or hell, they cannot avoid the reflection that 
Mrs. Oleander has gotten a new shawl, or 
that Miss Columbine has returned from Eu- 
rope or Long Branch ; but the rules of public 
address demand that from this multiplicity of 
ideas in the brain, a judicious selection should 
be made by the speaker, and that in his as- 
sumed discourse on some theological theme he 
must suppress his views about Mrs. Oleander 
and Miss Columbine. To Saint Augustine- it 
generally seemed otherwise. He opens the 
the windows of his heart and lets all things 
escape. He mingles into one not displeasing 
compound, God and ^Eneas and Dido, and 
wonders that when so easily able to weep for 
Dido slain he should have been so slow to 
weep for himself or for his God. He asks the 
•Almighty why he hated Homer and was fond 
of Virgil ? He informs the Lord that when 
a lad of fifteen he was wont to steal, and in 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 19 

proof of the assertion he cites an instance in 
which he had entered a garden to divest a 
pear tree of its coming crop. " Nor cared I 
to enjoy what I stole, bat I joyed in the theft 
and sin itself. A pear tree there was near 
our vineyard laden with fruit, tempting 
neither for color nor taste. To shake and rob 
this some leivd young fellows of us went late one 
night (having according to our pestilent cus- 
tom prolonged our sports in the streets till 
then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, 
but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted 
them. And this we did only because we loved 
to do that which ivas not lawful ! Behold my 
heart, 0, God ! behold my heart, upon which 
Thou hadst pity as it lay in the bottom of the 
bottomless pity A statement this which places 
before us the boys of the Roman world as they 
were fifteen hundred years ago; how they made 
the streets noisy with their games and mid- 
night a witness of their dusky forms as they 



20 CLUB ESSAYS. 



clambered over wall or fence; a statement 
which informs us that ho 2:8 ran free and 
hungry in the classic streets, and which recalls 
to mind the fact that the cooks of the period 
threw their kitchen-slops out of the front win- 
dow saying, " Beware" to the passer-by. 

In this wonderful pot pourri, there comes 
more of the beautiful than of the grotesque 
or ridiculous, and as a general rule the 
thoughts of the Saint flow along, much as do 
the meditations of a' Kempis and Richard Bax- 
ter. Almost all the leading doctrines of the 
Christian system, come under review, and the 
virtues and vices of Christians of the period 
are seen in the general parade. From the 
fact that each Christian felt that his God or 
his Saviour was always just at hand, the pre- 
vailing tone of religion was personal and spir- 
itual. It was not a philosophy, but an expe- 
rience. In our day Christianity among the 
educated is an intellectual platform of piety, 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 21 

just as republicanism or democracy is a plat- 
form of politics; but in the time of Saint Au- 
gustine, it was an experience, just as love or 
friendship is an experience of the soul. The 
sins of this olden time were more the sins of 
ignorance than of intention, and therefore the 
heart which committed them was often all the 
while a faithful friend of the Most High. 
Modern Christians are few who would write 
down such expressions as "too late have I 
loved Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days! 
yet ever new! too late have I loved Thee!" " Oh 
Thou sweetness never failing; Thou blissful 
and assured sweetness. " " When shall T see 
Thee, Oh Thou most dear, most loving, most 
benign, most precious, most longed for, most 
lovable, most beautiful, than honey sweeter, 
than snow or milk whiter, than nectar more 
delicious ; more valuable than all gold or gems, 
than all the riches and honors of the earth 
dearer ! " Even could such meditations find 



22 CLUB ESSAYS. 



their way into the modern mind, they would die 
on the lips that should attempt to give them 
audible utterance. Coming in the writings 
of this old Saint, they tell us not only what a 
passionate belief filled the soul of the writer 
but also the souls of the public, for each writer 
adapts his language to his age. We are thus 
assured that in the fourth century, the pro- 
fession of faith in Christ was a declaration of 
love, and that for him language summoned its 
best adjectives, and the heart poured out its 
best tears. The kissing of the feet, and the 
wiping of them with the long hair of woman, 
as seen in Magdalen, is seen over again in these 
pages, the actions of the beautiful woman be- 
ing spiritualized in the literature of a gifted 
man. 

Explanatory of the emotion of both Mary 
Magdalen and Saint Augustine, it must be ob- 
served that our Anglo-Saxon civilization is, 
perhaps, the coldest one the world has yet 



AUGUSTINE AND -HIS MOTHER. 23 

known. No Southern or Eastern land has ever 
equalled England and America in the ability 
and disposition to suppress emotion. Our 
greetings on the street and in social life are for- 
mal and empty, compared with even those of 
modern Germany and France and Italy, and 
when compared with the customs of the early 
centuries of our era, they fade as poor frost- 
bitten flowers. Whether the difference is not 
one of emotion so much as one of expression, is a 
question of value, but it is with outward sym- 
bols we are now dealing, and regarding these 
it must be declared that the forms of reveal- 
ing regard are in our land comparatively cold 
and thin. German men who are friends or 
relatives, often kiss each other and weep when 
they separate for a long period, thus showing 
us that there once flowed northward a wave of 
demonstrativeness from the land of hot hearts, 
and that that wave, now dying out on the 
German shore, was high and full when Aug- 



24 CLUB ESSAYS. 



ustine was living his intense years. His was 
a time of full utterance. Language was taxed 
to its uttermost, and gesture and rite and tears 
came to supplement the resources of the Latin 
and Greek tongues. Be the person loved a girl, 
a wife, a mother, or the Savior or the Creator, 
the mind always ransacked the prevailing lan- 
guage for words that would come somewhere 
near conveying an idea of the heart's attach- 
ment. The demand added to the supply, and 
those southeastern tongues all became power- 
ful in their terms of praise and endearment 
— a power which was inherited by the mod- 
ern dialects of western Europe. 

One of the forms of interest and utility 
with which these "Confessions" abound, is the 
conspicuous place occupied by the mother of 
the remarkable son. Monica is a prominent 
figure in this passion-play. While it is prob- 
able that she does not represent the average 
wife and mother of that world, yet it is desira- 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 25 

ble to know what merit and maternal love and 
wisdom were possible and occasional in a time 
so far removed from our own. It is a blessed 
sight to behold such a wife standing forth 
upon the dark back-ground of classic and an- 
cient customs, and to see a mother so loved by 
a great son in a day when the father was the 
chief personage in the house, and when the 
mother was only a domestic slave. Divorce 
was frequent and easy. The mother was liable 
at any time to be banished from her home and 
separated from her children. When mindful 
of these cruelties of antiquity we shall read 
the history of Monica as one of antiquity's 
brightest pages. 

Monica was a Numidian girl. Her country 
corresponded to the modern Algiers. It was 
adjacent to Carthage, and hence enjoyed the 
influence of that illustrious city. For several 
centuries Carthage and Alexandria had been 
the successors of Greece and of intellectual 



26 CLUB ESSAYS. 



Rome. The military and political power of 
Rome were on the northern border of the 
Mediterranean; on the southern border were 
her literature and libraries. The new religion" 
followed the intellectual parallels and made a 
grand conquest of the Alexandrian and Afri- 
can Romans. Tagaste, a town in Numidia, 
the first home of Augustine, must have sus- 
tained toward Carthage such relations as all 
towns are wont to sustain toward this metrop- 
olis ; so that Monica, a girl in Numidia, must 
have enjoyed such an education and general 
culture as she would have received had she 
passed her girlhood in the larger city of 
greater fame. Among other teachings she 
drank in fully the cup of Christianity, as it 
was handed along in that part of our era. 
That she accepted of it as the true and only 
message from God to man may be inferred from 
the fact that her heart revealed an intense fear 
her promising son might not find that 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 27 

path of service and safety. Her zeal followed 
this child with prayers and tears until she 
saw her dear one, at the age of thirty, 
pass oyer from paganism to the tenets of the 
Gospels. She made long journeys to visit Au- 
gustine and plead with him, and his record of 
this faithful pursuing from city to city shows 
that her visits were not meddlesome, and as is 
often the case full of mortification for proud 
youths who have outgrown the parental wis- 
dom, but they were as the visits of a true love ; 
and even when her arguments were not con- 
vincing they were all welcome to the affec- 
tionate son. It is well that in the lives of 
three most illustrous personages — Christ and 
Aurelius and Augustine — the nearest being to 
each one was the mother! Not always in 
our world does the crown of affection rest 
upon the right forehead. 

In Monica we may see the traces of the cus- 
tomary bondage of the wife, which, next to the 



28 CLUB ESSAYS. 



slavery of men, has disgraced the past of hu- 
manity. What exact quality of a husband 
this Numidian woman found is not told us, but 
that he possessed the prevailing low ideas of 
a wife is fully evinced by the inquiry which 
her women-friends raised — how it happened 
that, having been a wife so long, she had no 
marks on her face and body of blows received 
in the ordinary experience of married life ? 
We can paint a picture here. A half-dozen 
wives have met, perhaps, at a common resort 
on the sea, and while sitting idly together in 
the afternoon, their husbands being absent on 
a fishing or tippling or theological excursion, 
these wives fall into a free discourse about the 
scars and wounds on their bodies. One has a 
slightly broken nose ; one has lost a couple of 
front teeth ; one has a long scar on her cheek ; 
one has a mark over an eye ; but upon looking 
toward Monica to note which of these marriage 
certificates she may possess, they find none. 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 



and then she explains to them that for years 
she has made no answer to scoldings, and has 
in such an adroit manner studied silence and 
conciliation that she has escaped blows with 
club or rod, and has received words only, and 
they leave no scar. Other of the wives then 
tell what it was that made their lordly husband 
administer the blow under contemplation. No 
one of these women sigh for sorrow at the re- 
membrance of such violence, for such sighing 
would imply that in their hearts was slumber- 
ing some delicate ideal of domestic love. No 
one of them, not even Monica, could recall a 
time when a husband had put any flowers in 
her hair, or had kissed her in presence of guests, 
but easily can they remember that Paul has 
said that wives must obey their husbands, and 
that Xenophon has said that if a wife wants 
exercise let her fold and arrange all the clothes. 
And yet in a day when all customs tended to 
dwarf the wife and the mother, Monica flour- 



30 CLUB ESSAYS, 



isliecl and triumphed under the marriage-roof, 
and attached her children to her in bonds of 
love that would be thought very powerful, 
even in our age. 

And yet this very wife who had managed 
affairs so well, did not fully realize, in the ab- 
stract, the sphere of wife or mother, for the 
terms are mutually explanatory. Nor had 
she or her husband or her son a moral sense 
that would compare favorably with the highest 
moral ideas of modern Christianity. These 
two defects will appear in the fact that this 
Christian woman rather opposed the marriage 
of her son, and did not battle so bravely to 
pursuade her gifted boy to give up his un- 
lawful mistress as to give up his paganism. 
Even so pious and devoted a mother could not 
take in the whole circle of the new morality, 
but splendid as she was, she had one foot back 
upon the borders of the dark land. She was 
anxious for her child to escape to Christ, not 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 31 

dreaming that she had not herself fully come 
to his moral hight. To all this truly noble 
Christian group marriage appeared as the at- 
tribute of man as an animal, and therefore 
between mistress and wife the difference 
did not seem remarkable. The long and great 
struggle of Augustine to find some light in 
this matter came largely from the power of 
long customs and from the low general estimate 
of woman. When at last thirty-three years 
had brought him some reason and the power 
to put away the temporary friend, he did not 
make a wife of her, who had been all things 
to him, faithfully for years, and was the moth- 
er of the beautiful Adeodatus, but discarding 
her, he begins to talk with God about matri- 
mony, and prays for a wife that may bring 
him some money, and may thus add to his 
happiness without adding to the family ex- 
pense. Thus throughout this domestic group 
there is visible more of piety than of intelli- 



CLUB ESSAYS. 



gence. As a child can have emotions, but 
only old age have wisdom, so the infancy of a 
religion may possess faith and zeal, while the 
delicate perception of right and wrong waits 
the slow coming of thought and experience. 

At last by her pleadings with her family 
and at the throne of mercy, Monica led her 
son and husband and some of the nearest rela- 
tives and friends over from the old religion to 
the new. This transformation took place at 
Milan. Milan being then a rival of Rome in 
material and intellectual greatness, being full 
of the "pomp and circumstance of Kings/' 
the wish sprang up in the hearts of these new 
converts to return to Africa, and for a time en- 
joy the meditation and spiritual luxury of 
solitude. Along with all these early conver- 
sions came a contempt of the world. The early 
Christians loved a solitude because they 
thought that the absence of man secured the 
presence of God. Having found Christ the 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 33 

heart sought a hidden room or a cave in the 
rocks or a trackless forest, that it might see 
only its Savior. 

In obedience to this philosophy, Augustine 
and his mother set forth for the coast. Loved 
attendants followed. They came to the well 
known port of Ostia, and as nobody was ever 
in haste in that epoch, and as all these travel- 
ers were weary from their overland trip, they 
determined to spend a few days or perhaps 
weeks at this old town by the sea. The Med- 
iterranean tempered the winds which came 
from the southern region, while the moun- 
tains cooled those that came from the north. 
On one of these peaceful days the son and the 
mother were standing, and leaning out of a 
large window which looked out upon a blos- 
soming garden and a serene sky. The scene 
and the rapture of their hearts brought these 
strange lovers a theme of discourse. They be- 
gan to wonder what would be the nature of 
3 



CLUB ESSAYS. 



that world which should come beyond the 
earthly flowers, and the blue sky of these days; 
to wonder with what kind of sweetness that 
life would begin, and with what rich employ- 
ment proceed in its endlessness. Picture for 
painter, this son aged thirty-three, and this 
mother aged fifty-six, hand in hand like lov- 
ers looking out of a window, and with upturned 
faces attempting to see beyond the curtains of 
eternity. The vision and thoughts were too 
rich. They expelled from the mother's 
bosom the beloved Africa, and made her soul 
long for a holier rest than any along the 
shores of the sea that now murmured at her 
feet. "My son why should I stay longer in 
this world? I have seen my household all 
converted from darkness to light, and now why 
might I not wish to go to the world where 
my Lord dwells?" While Monica thus talked, 
the change of worlds was coming silently. 
In a few days after this conference, which 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 35 

will remind the reader of the similar dis- 
courses which Aurelius and his mother held 
in pagan words, Augustine was summoned to 
his mother's room. She had fainted away in 
a fever. In our day there are fevers which 
seem to touch the mind before they are per- 
ceived in the body. The door-bell is heard to 
ring, and persons are heard to call one's name, 
when no one has rung and no one has spoken ; 
tears of memory fill the eyes ; the present 
seem absent or the absent seem to have come 
home. The victim of these deceptions feels 
bewildered, but often laughs at the cheats. In 
a few days the rapid development of a fever 
explains the strange action of the mind. It 
may be that when in the far off times this 
beautiful mother stood by that window, which 
has long since decayed, and looked out over 
the garden whose trees are now dead, a malar- 
ial fever touched her mind with its chilling 
shadow, and made her heart wish to fly away 



36 CLUB ESSAYS. 



and be at rest. She heard music and voices 
not of earth. She seemed to see a land 
sweeter than the one held by the arms of the 
Romans or by the literature of the Greeks. 
In a few days the fever had made unconscious 
the mind which had filled years with its 
prayers and reasonings and love. But reason 
returned long enough to j^rrnit this noble 
woman to reveal one more color of her love- 
liness — a deep humility — for she requested 
her son not to move her body to her home, 
but to bury her at Ostia and to hold a service 
full of simplicity — beyond that he must re- 
member her always before the altars of God. 
The events which followed this dying scene, 
cast some light upon the services of that period. 
The neighbors began to pour into the house 
where the dead woman lay, and some one began 
to chant a psalm, and all the house-full began 
to make responses, thus showing us that the 
music and general service of the fourth cent- 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 37 

ury was much like that of the Episcopal 
Church of the present. The funeral was 
without lamentations, not even tears being 
thought proper, for the soul had gone to a better 
land, and therefore, said Augustine, they at- 
tempted to conceal or prevent expressions of 
sorrow. The distinguished son himself, hav- 
ing invited the company into a room removed 
from the one where friends were preparing 
the body for burial, delivered an address to 
them " upon themes befitting the time," thus 
incidentally teaching us that Christianity had 
robbed the grave of victory, and death of its 
sting, and had enabled a son to contemplate 
peacefully a dead face, which, living, had been 
his inexpressible joy. 

A portion of the dying request of Monica 
has led to some discussions among theologians. 
She asked to be remembered at the Lord's al- 
tar wherever the living son might be. Ro- 
man Catholic writers cite this request and the 



38 CLUB ESSAYS. 



obedience of Augustine, as proof that prayers 
for the dead have the authority of the early 
church. Dr. Shedd, of the Presbyterian de- 
nomination, urges that no such inference can 
be drawn from such an incident, but there is 
no space here for either side of the debate. 
In my opinion the dying mother asked her 
son to pray for her always and, in my opinion, 
the son was true to the request ; but the force 
of such praying for the dead is all taken away 
by the fact that both Augustine and his 
mother did many things not worthy of imita- 
tion by any subsequent generation. If all 
things, the early Christians did may become a 
basis of church law and practice, then nothing 
is more useless than human habits of thought 
and progress. Augustine thought that sing- 
ing in church had a tendency to exalt music 
above God. To confess the simple facts of 
history and then deny their value as an ex- 
ample, would seem more rational than to 



AUGUSTIXE AXD HIS MOTHEE. 39 

resort to tire method of Dr. Shedd which, ap- 
pears to be only a piece of theological trifling. 
Monica asked to be remembered in the family 
petitions, which should be offered up after she 
had passed away ; Augustine went to the altar 
and prayed for his dead parent and his prayer 
is all written down. Such facts leave no room 
for Protestant quibble, neither do they afford 
any basis of the Roman doctrine and practice, 
for the Romanists assume that what an old 
Saint did, becomes church doctrine, and they 
further assume that by prayers for the dead, 
they can for money, lift a soul from purga- 
tory. Augustine's prayer was not made for 
money, nor under any assumption of power, 
not by a third party having only official re- 
lations to the departed soul ; but it was an 
outpouring of love, a strewing of lilies upon 
a tomb, a remembrance not official by a priest, 
but solemn and private by a lonely bereaved 
heart. If the Roman Catholic Church should 



40 CLUB ESSAYS. 



teach, her men, young and old, who may lose 
a wise and affectionate mother, to repair often 
to her grave and there pray to Heaven to 
make more and more blessed her stay among 
the angels, and to help them obey the holy 
words she had taught them, prayers for the 
dead would be less objectionable, for they 
would seem to be only the efforts of human 
affection to carry on its loying intercourse 
across the valley of death. It is possible that 
the Protestant notion is as much too cold and 
iron like as the Roman doctrine is too preten- 
tious and mercenary. It may be that in the 
cold North, cold by climate and cold by phil- 
osophy, death is permitted to cause too abso- 
lute a separation between husband and wife, 
brother and sister, mother and child. It 
might perhaps be permitted the weeping heart 
standing on the earthly shore to cast out to- 
ward the invisible realm, prayers for those 
who have gone away, and to cherish the hope 



AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 41 

that those absent ones were also presenting in 
their better land, petitions for the happiness 
and salvation of the dear ones left in this life 
of temptation and suffering. For such ration- 
alizing, for such sifting of opinion, Augustine 
and his mother did not wait. For thirty-three 
years this mother and son had given and re- 
ceived love ; had exchanged thoughts upon all 
possible subjects; had held hands as though 
two lovers or two little children, and when 
death came to the parent, the friendship of 
the son did not cease, but its words became 
prayers and were flung out into the spiritual 
world by an impassioned soul. 



A ROMAN HOME 



A ROMAN HOME. 

A LETTER TO HIS FRIEND XIMINES, FROM TIRO, A SLAVE OF 
CICERO. 

Dear Ximines: 

I am still near the spot where my master 
was murdered. I am in his deserted library, 
and from a place so full of sacred memory, I 
must now write to you a long letter with the 
long promised grave and light particulars 
about this greatest of the Romans. As though 
you were a woman, you beg to know all about 
the house and the wife and the children, and 
even the table and the entire private life of 
this orator. The wish is well enough ; be- 
cause you can thus compare Rome with 
Athens. Your wish shall be gratified in part, 
for the cruel death of my kind master only 
last week renders sacred even the small things 
that now come up to notice or to memory. 
(45) 



46 CLUB ESSAYS. 



Even this double inkstand, with black ink in 
one side and red ink in the other, recalls the 
dead, for it is the very one which my Cice- 
ro shook up when he said he must write more 
distinctly to his brother Quintus. 

Does it seem so to you ? but I have indeed 
been the secretary and librarian of this Bo- 
man for twenty years. You remember that 
when I was a mere lad in Athens and was being 
taught the two great languages and all letters 
that I might be a literary slave to some of the 
Athenians, Cicero, who was then in our city to 
study rhetoric with old Demetrius, formed 
quite an attachment to me, and hoped to call 
me some day to Rome. Twenty years have 
now passed since he sent for me and paid my 
former master a large sum for his literary 
slave, Tiro. 

That you may know how light my bondage 
for these years has been, and how well quali- 
fied lam to speak about hisdomestic life, I must 



A ROMAN HOME. 47 

insert an extract here from the almost daily let- 
ters which Cicero sent me when he was absent, 
and when I was sick at Tusculum. 

"I did not imagine, dear Tiro, that I should 
have been so little able to bear your absence, 
but indeed it is almost beyond endurance. 
Should you embark immediately you would 
overtake me at Leucas. But if you are in- 
clined to defer your voyage till your recovery 
shall be more confirmed, let me entreat you to 
be careful in selecting a safe ship, and be 
careful that you sail in good weather, and not 
without a convoy. It is true I am extremely 
desirous of your company, and as early as 
possible, but the same affection which makes 
me wish to see you soon, makes me wish to see 
you well." 

And I must add here, lest I forget it, that 
my master never struck men or scolded me, nor 
did he ever treat any of his slaves with any 
cruelty. Some of the Romans do indeed abuse 



13 CLUB ESSAYS. 



their servants, and one matron recently or- 
dered one of her dressing maids put to death 
because she arranged badly, or made some 
error in the toilet of her mistress, but I never 
saw any such inhumanity in the house of my 
great master. I must insert here an extract 
from another letter : 

" I dispatched a letter to you from this place 
yesterday, where I continued all day waiting 
for my brother, and this I write just as we are 
setting out, and before sunrise. If vou have 
any regard for us, but particularly for me, 
show it by your care to re-establish your 
health. It is with great impatience I expect 
to meet you at Leucas; but if that cannot be, 
my next wish is that I may find Mario there 
with a letter. We all, but more particularly 
myself, long to see you ; however, we would 
by no means, dear Tiro, indulge ourselves in 
that pleasure unless it may be consistent with 
your health. I can forego your assistance, 



A ROMAN HOME. 49 

but your health, my dear Tiro, I would love 
to see restored, partly for your own sake — 
partly for mine. Farewell." 
Alyzia Nov., 5 A. M. 703. 

Such kind letters he continually wrote me, 
and so many, that now I have quite a number 
of them, and how valuable they are, since they 
make me feel not that I passed long years of 
painful servitude with such a man, but instead, 
long years of elevating companionship. 

When coming hither, so many years ago, on 
reaching the harbor nearest the Formian Villa, 
I found on the shore quite a crowd of people 
and an assortment of conveyances, much like 
those we have at home; there were carriages 
for those who had furthest to go; there were 
litters for those who lived only a few stadia 
over the hills. I inquired for the house of Cic- 
ero, and was pointed to a man as being 
the good Roman himself. In a plain but ele- 
4 



CLUB ESSAYS. 



gant litter sat my future master. In another ele- 
gant one with embroidered curtains, sat his wife 
Terentia Cicero, and the little daughter Tullia. 
These litters were resting on their wooden 



braces, while the sixteen slaves, whose business 
it was to carry them, were lounging around in 
the sun, almost every one of them having his 
hand full of ripe figs at which he was munch- 
ing cheerfully. Cicero had come partly to meet 
me, but partly from the custom the rich fami- 
lies have of going to the harbor, when they see 
a vessel coming in. This great Roman De- 
mosthenes seemed glad to meet me, and as 
we went home, I walked along-side his litter, 
and as the curtains were looped up, he talked 
all the while in a most elegant manner. He 
found me quite familiar with recent and old 
books, and at each discovery that I could speak 
both Latin and Greek correctly, his face bright- 
ened. 

I then thought him a very homely man. 



A ROMAN HOME. 51 

He was thin and pale, and his neck was very 
long. When he reached over the rail to look 
forward or back, his neck seemed long as that 
of a crane. But amid the beauty of his char- 
acter, the plainness of his person passed away. 
Terentia seemed cold and unbending and did 
not so much as speak to me, but Tullia, the 
little daughter, called out to me to ask if I 
would not help her get out her lessons in Greek. 
Did you know, Ximines, that the wealthy 
Romans do not limit themselves to one country 
place ? In addition to a costly city residence, 
my master had fourteen villas for his summer 
or winter pleasure. Wherever an island or a 
harbor or a hill, especially pleased him, he 
bought or built a house, and several places 
were given him by wealthy friends, who were 
or might be his clients in law, or who were 
moved by simple friendship. Many large 
sums were given to this lawyer in the wills of 
those who had been near him in life. 



52 CLUB ESSAYS. 



Happy summers we spent sailing or journey- 
ing to and fro among these beautiful jDlaces of 
rest. The Tusculum Villa was the favorite of 
us all, and the chief of the group. It was in 
the border of Rome. From it we could see all 
the public buildings in the one direction and 
all the beauty of hill and vale and water and 
sky in another. Here were our library, our 
pictures, our statuary, our best gardens and 
fields, our fowls, geese, ducks, pheasants, pea- 
cocks and pigeons. My master's city residence 
was costly, and was wonderful in its orna- 
ments and apartments, but we all loved more 
the resort out at Tusculum. That city home, 
Clodius, the consul, in the dej>tli of malice, or- 
dered to be razed to the ground when he ban- 
is! led Cicero. For days the mob and also the 
better people could be seen carrying off frag- 
ments or ornaments or founder from that over- 
thrown palace. But a change of consuls soon 
came and Rome recalled the exile and rebuilt 
our city house. 



A ROMAN HOME. 53 

Our Tusculum villa is built much like a gen- 
eral's camp, the soul being in the centre, the 
body, the impedimenta, being located all 
around the valuable part. The main hall of 
villa is the soul. Here is the conversation, 
here the beauty, here the feast, here the art, 
here the whole family. All around are 
the shops and sleeping bunks of the servants. 
This villa is approached through a long lane 
of dwarf box. This accommodating shrub is 
trimmed and bent into the shapes of animals 
in a pretty or grotesque manner. Eampant 
lions and the panther so much seen in the 
games, the peacock and other birds are on 
either hand as you approach the main entrance 
of the house. The structure measures about 
a hundred feet across the front and extends 
back fully two hundred feet. The exterior is 
set apart for rooms for the artisan slaves. 
Our carpenter has one, our tailor one, our 
groom one, our cook one, and thus on until the 



54 CLUB ESSAYS. 



the family is in the midst of quite an army of 
these domestic troops. Like almost all the 
Koman houses it is built of brick, but some 
parts of it are lined with marble. But Rome 
is a brick city, the bricks being about one span 
square. Entering this large square by a beau- 
tiful gate, you are passed inward by the keep- 
ers, and after a few steps you come into the 
large hall, which is the home of the Cicero 
family. Marble columns support the roof, 
which is raised high above the head. Marble 
is under foot. All around one stands stat- 
uary, most of which come from Greek 
towns. The side walls are made of stucco, 
and these are exquisitely painted. To the 
height of a man above the floor, the colors 
are dark, and the figures are set ones, but 
above that the colors are very brig] it and the 
figures either perfect vines and flowers, or else 
images of human and divine ideals. In 
tliis immense room we ate and talked, and 



A ROMAN HOME. 55 



played and laughed, and gave parties, and 
danced and were happy, until death entered 
the gate to break up this island of the blessed. 
In some Eoman houses in the city there are 
steps to lead up to a second story, but this is 
rarely the case. The bed-chambers are re- 
cesses from the great hall and sometimes there 
is one sleeping berth above another, and the 
one who sleeps above climbs up by two pins 
inserted in the masonry. 

At Tusculum, my master had a bed-room 
made for himself in the rear of the building. 
He had ordered deadened walls on all sides, 
and a window that he could darken ; that 
when he had been up late at night he might 
not be disturbed by that clatter of all kinds 
made by the slaves, nor be awakened by the 
too obtrusive sunshine of the morning. 

The library was a room with the walls on all 
sides arranged for books. Each book had its 
little cell, like the holes in which our pigeons 



56 CLUB ESSAYS. 



live. It was not my place to take care of 
the volumes, but to read them to my master and 
to his family and friends ; and to be forever 
seeking for new truths or ideas or beauties for 
the great orator's happiness and use. He had 
a slave who looked after the binding and dust- 
ing and arranging of the works. Cicero 
would not permit a dirty cover to remain on a 
volume, nor a soiled label. All must be bright 
and cheerful, much as the good man was himself. 
One set of books he had such as I never saw 
at Athens — books full of j>ortraits. He had 
seven hundred portraits of distinguished Ro- 
mans. As Brutus and Cresar had the same 
pictures in their libraries, I concluded and 
heard that there was some shoj) where one 
picture could be multiplied until all could 
have copies; but I have not yet found that 
ingenious shop. 

Our library is ornamented in fine manner 
by paintings and statuary. Now I remember 



A ROMAN HOME, 57 



how mad my master was, when, having or- 
dered Atiicus to buy him some good pieces in 
Greece, that erring friend shipped to us a lot 
of cupids and nymphs. My master did not 
want such stuff in his rooms. 

Passing out of the library, one comes to the 
flower-garden and fish-ponds and poultry-yard. 
How much that great Cicero did love his 
geese and peacocks and chickens and pigeons ! 
Even when he knew he must make an im- 
portant speech that day, and when he was full 
of care about the oration, he would yet take 
the time in the morning to go out and see how 
the pigeons and pheasants were getting along. 
I have known him to pay a large sum for tw T o 
pigeon's eggs that he heard w r ould hatch out 
some rare species. In the flower-garden and 
among the fruit trees, the dinner and supper 
were often served in the summer months. I 
often read aloud while the family ate. I loved 
thus to read, for the grass under foot secured 



53 CLUB ESSAYS. 



for us such a sileuce that reading and hearing 
were more delightful. 

Permit me now to rest } t ou a little, dear Xirn- 
ines, by leading you from the small to the 
great, for you know, dear friend, the soul is 
so constructed that it can find rest in going 
from the little to the large, or from the large 
to the little. Man can walk a circle with less 
fatigue if at times he changes his direction. 
Let me tell you about Cicero as a student and 
an orator. He was wider in his taste than our 
Demosthenes. You know our orator loved 
only matters of State, but this Roman loved 
all books and all things. He read everything 
he could find. If I found a good passage I 
went to him with it, perfectly assured that he 
would enjoy it whether it was prose or poetry, 
or law or religion or geography, or only a 
piece for exciting laughter. In one way or 
another, all he saw or heard or read, helped 
him in either his public speeches or in his 



A ROMAN HOME. 59 

conversations. All that went into his brain 
came ont again in some better shape. He will 
live in the world's fame as an orator, but I shall 
remember with deepest pleasure his fun and 
talk at home. Every evening friends came in. 
There were Trebatius and Hortensius and 
Atticus and Rufus and Brutus and Cato, and 
by degrees my master would become aroused, 
and all evening long he would pour forth 
jokes and anecdotes or else would quote gems 
from the poets. He was a mimic of manners 
and would keep all delighted by mimicing all 
the bad and eccentric speakers of the city and 
the clowns of the day. Grave as my master 
was in his public addresses, he filled some of 
his letters to friends and sometimes the rooms 
of justice and always our home, with sayings 
that led to much laughter and much good 
cheer. In all the letters he wrote to the young 
lawyer, Trebatius, who had gone with Caesar 
on his British expedition, there were seldom 



60 CLUB ESSAYS. 



any words except those of pure humor. He 
exj)ressed in one of them the opinion that his 
friend had gone over the sea, that he might be 
the greatest lawyer now living in Britain. 
In another he opines that the reason why his 
friend had remained carefully away from bat- 
tle, could not be found in any cowardice, but 
it must have been in the unwillingness of a 
student of law to be guilty of making an as- 
sault. In one of the rejdies of Trebatius, 
there were signs that some former writing had 
been erased to leave the page blank for the 
letter to Cicero. In the next missile to this 
absent friend, Cicero expressed a wonder 
what could have been on that paper that 
could have made it less valuable than the pro- 
posed letter — lie concluded that what was 
erased "must have been one of your own 
(Tribatius') briefs." 

"When Verres was upon trial for defrauding 
the people of Sicily, for stealing statuary and 



A ROMAN HOME, 61 



jewels and pictures, and for assessing and col- 
lecting most unjust taxes, Hortensius defend- 
ed, and Cicero prosecuted the accused. It was 
known to my master that Verres had sent to 
his attorney a valuable piece of marble — an 
Egyptian Sphynx. In the course of the ex- 
amination of witnesses, Hortensius became 
angry at one of those on the side of the prose- 
cution, and thundered out that he wanted no 
riddles but a plain statement of facts. Cicero 
said calmly, " Hortensius, you should be glad 
to get a supply of riddles since you have at 
home such a valuable sphynx/' This quite 
upset the gravity of the crowd, and all laughed 
over the predicament of the distinguished Hor- 
tensius. 

There was a form of literary sport which 
was my master's great delight — a double use 
of a word ; a use in which the hidden import 
would suddenly spring up bringing always a 
pleasure. These double-edged words he loved 



G2 CLUB ESSAYS. 



to send off to this same fun-loving Trebatius. 
He reminded him that the winters would be 
cold up in Gaul, but that his regimentals , when 
they should come, would keep out much cold; 
and that Caesar would perhaps have some hot 
work for him ; and that upon the whole he was 
not so hopeless as a soldier as he was as a law- 
yer. Trebatius having remained on the 
peaceful side of a river while Caesar went over 
to fight, Cicero congratulated the friend that 
he had so far eliminated all ill-will from 
his heart that he had become unwilling to 
cross water ! ! ! 

Indeed I shall not deny that to see the house- 
tops covered with people and the streets 
densely crowded with a multitude, all silent to 
hear Cicero speak against the cruel Verres, or 
the despot Antony, was a great spectacle and 
one which it was my fortune often to witness, 
but, for some reason, my own memory will 
cherish most those evenings in the villas when 



A ROMAN HOME. 63 

the jokes were so good and all were so per- 
fectly happy. Julius Caesar at one time de- 
termined to gather up in a little volume, all 
the Cicero stories and witticisms he could find, 
but I fear that the last fiye years of Caesar's 
life were passed in so much war and turmoil 
that he neyer prosecuted his intention. At 
none of the bookstores do I find any such yol- 
ume. I need no such yolume, but the laugh- 
ing world will. 

My master spoke much like the orators we 
haye seen and heard in Athens. He imitated 
and he acted as he spoke. He threw himself 
about from place to place on the rostrum and 
seemed to haye in him the souls of a whole 
company of men. When he first began 
speaking in public, he was so full of action 
and passion that he injured his health and was 
compelled to leaye Rome and seek peace 
abroad. He spoke just as do the actors in 
the theaters changing his face and voice to 



6 J: CLUB ESSAYS. 



suit each style of the changing thought and 
argument, He had an extreme ambition and 
seemed to know in you th that he was destined 
to be great. When he entered the law some 
wanted him to change his name, for Cicero 
meant only a vegetable. They told him it 
did not sound large enough. He said in re- 
ply that he would keep his father's name and 
make it sound honorable. He wore out his 
health in a few years and sailed to Greece for 
rest. On his return, he assumed a manner a 
little more quiet but it was still very full of 
action. But, my good friend, he was a won- 
derful man. I always attended him when he 
was to make a speech that when he came to 
write it out fully afterward, I could aid 
him if he had lost any particular thought or 
the structure of a sentence. I have known 
the lawyers opposed in a case to my master to 
venture no reply but to abandon their cause 
after Cicero bad made his opening speech. 



A B02IAX HOME. 



A rather amusing event took place while 
Caesar was dictator, onlv a few years a 2:0. A 
case was before Csesar. The evidence having 
been all taken, Csesar was about to give his 
judgment and had declared that no speeches 
need be made as his mind had been made up 
fully that the person charged was guilty. 
Cicero arose to make a brief voluntary plea. 
Csesar said jokingly that he had not heard 
Cicero for so long that it would be rather 
pleasant to hear the good fellow speak once 
again. He heard him; got amazed and 
highly wrought up, and discharged the accused 
as being the most innocent man of his ac- 
quaintance. 

Ah, my Ximines, let me tell you more now 
of the home life of the dead orator and master, 
more dear to me as a master than as an orator. 
Let me tell you briefly about the social scenes 
in our city house, and also in the Villa at 
Tusculum. One of our largest reunions of 



06 CLUB ESSAYS. 



friends was given when Cicero's only daugh- 
ter Tullia had just begun to attract the atten- 
tions of Roman lovers. As soon as night had 
fully come the friends began to pour in. Some 
came by carriages, some by the popular litter. 
At last you could have seen gathered in the 
hall Julius Cassar and his wife ; Decimus 
Brutus and Marcus Brutus, Cato, Horten- 
sius, Marcus Antony, Crassus, Quint us Cicero, 
the brother of my Marcus, Pompey and Pub- 
lius, Crassus Atticus, Casca, and a hundred 
other such notable men. Not any less was the 
number of the noble women and maidens. 
Pomponia, the wife of Cicero's brother, came 
early and had begun to chat with her sister-in- 
law. Corelia, the daughter of Metellus Scipio, 
was there dressed in plain, but rich costume, 
for she was a woman of intellect rather than 
of (1 less. She resembled the Cornelia of Grac- 
chi fame. The Lrclia girls were present in all 
their style of costume arid beauty of face. 



A ROMAN HOME. 67 

In this throng were not a few of the Roman 
u pretty men" homo hellus. There were three 
Laelia girls and they might have stood for 
three graces. The talk that Cicero thought 
too highly of these daughters was all old time 
gossip. The bellus homo is a man wholly de- 
voted to fashion and dress and pleasure. The 
number of these has greatly increased of late 
years. The younger men in general seem to 
be of this sleek and effeminate school. The 
sons of the great Senators and orators are for 
the most part idle, pretty men, who part their 
hair with the utmost precision and smell of 
all the perfumes of the South. They wear 
snow-white robes, and powder like women to 
make white their bare arms ; and in the wear- 
ing of rings they equal any matron of this dy- 
ing Republic. These youths gathered that 
night in one corner of the great hall, and with 
a few equally silly girls they hummed over 
part of Nile love songs, and lounged in the 



68 CLUB ESSAYS. 



large soft seats designed for the ladies of 
rank. 

Most of the love songs here locate their 
scenes of romance and the actors in the scenes 
over on the Nile ; not only because Cleopatra 
has introduced there an era of sentiment, but 
rather because the spirit of romance always finds 
its ideal land away from home, there being no 
witchery in things that are near. I remember 
that we boys at Athens sang of Roman adven- 
ture, but coming hither I found the Roman 
young souls locating the exploits of successful 
and unsuccessful love as far as possible away 
from all existing realities. It must belong to 
human nature to cover up with enchantment 
hills and vales and peoples that are just beyond 
the eye's field of vision. 

At times T heard some elegant measures 
from some thoughtful poet, but for the most 
pari these brainless youths sang little versea 
of which I may give you here a fair sample: 



A ROMAN HOME. 



If you would live your life 
In the light of woman's smile 
And escape all toil and strife 
Then away to the Nile! 

There my barge may float all night 
On the love- creating stream 
Where the soft and amber light 
Changes life into a dream. 

My love is in the boat 
And I am by her side; 
Oh, let me ever float 
On this love-producing tide. 

In Rome at all hours of the night one can 
hear some part of this shape of song rising up 
from the streets, and so fully alive is the whole 
city to the romance of love affairs, that even old 
men whistle these tunes as they plod along to 
work or to idleness, generally to idleness, for 
none but slaves pursue any toilsome occupation. 

Of this trifling class was Cicero's son Marcus. 
At least while away in Greece at school, word 
often came to us that he was living in a disi- 
pated manner and was spending much more 
money than had been allowed him. But not 
of this foolish class was the daughter Tullia. 



70 CLUB ESSAYS. 



She resembled her father in her love of learn- 
ing and of wise conversation, and thus when 
our parties were given this beautiful girl was 
found talking with Caesar or Pollio or Archias, 
rather than with the fops at the other end of 
the corridor. Had I not been only a servant, 
it would have been an immeasurable joy could 
I have sought and gained her love. As things 
were, I confess, my dear Ximines, my heart 
beat quickly with happiness when she 
would request me to bring her a certain vol- 
ume and read for the company, at her com- 
mand, some sentiment that had given her 
delight. My partiality, perhaps, made me ad- 
mire her dress more than the magnificent 
toilet of Csesar's wife or the gay attire of the 
Laelia daughters. On this particular evening 
Tullia wore over her wine-colored dress a del- 
icately tinted pink scarf which quite enfolded 
her. It had a still brighter border. Her hair 
was heaped up rather negligently on her head, 



A ROMAN HOME. 



and was held in place by a gold arrow. As 
she played on the harp and sang, she showed 
a sandal with a rim of gold all around the sole, 
and a perfect network of pearls covering the 
instep of her almost sacred foot. Add to these 
ornaments a golden ball which she would at 
times toss to some, and from which would gush 
forth a little cloud of perfumed dust, and you 
can see this loved and now wept-for Tullia. 
I used to wonder what the great father would 
have said or done had I ever taken by the hand 
that beautiful being, or had I ever addressed a 
note of affection to her. Now that both are dead 
I am glad that my insane love never ventured 
forth in formal language. 

On this evening we had for the feast all the 
fish and fowls and fruits known to Roman or 
Greek, and the most elegant wines. Cicero 
loved glassware with quite a passion, and his 
engraved goblets passed freely about, filled 
with their nectar of Bacchus. Caesar, the 



72 CLUB ESSAYS. 



most distinguished of our guests, ate but lit- 
tle, but you should have seen him eat ouce at 
our Formian house. He announced that he 
was intending to have a full feast, and feast he 
did, for he intended on rising from dinner to 
take an emetic, and spare himself the pain of 
digesting such a load of meat and fruit and 
wine. You know the feast-goers often do this — 
eat all they can, with the intention of taking, 
after the meal, this "emetikan." The glut- 
tons do it, not that they may escape distress, 
but that they may return and eat a second 
dinner the same night, They create a stom- 
ach like that of the vulture, which can load 
and unload almost at pleasure. For another 
reason Caesar's visit to our Formin village was 
remarkable, for he brought with him a thousand 
men, soldiers and friends. Most of them en- 
camped in the garden, but my master had to 
feed all outside the environsand to entertain the 
important men of the number within the walls, 



A ROMAN HOME. 



and the}' ate and drank in a most hearty man- 
ner. Next day, when the company had departed 
to the last man, Cicero came up to me in the 
library, and remarked, with a grave face : 
" Caesar is indeed a very notable guest, but he 
is not one of those fellows to whom, on going, 
one says, ' Call again.' " 

My master was no feasting man. There 
were only a few simple things he could eat. 
No fish or oyster could he digest, and even 
after all the care he took of his health he suf- 
fered all the years I was with him. He drank 
wine, but seldom to excess. Only one night is 
recalled now when he came home with his 
intellect clouded by w T ine. He had been out 
spending the evening with two fellow lawyers, 
and coming home about midnight he did not 
as usual come into the library, but he passed 
straight to his room. In the morning he 
mentioned, with regret, that he feared he had 
drank so much the night before as to expel 



CLUB ESSAYS. 



his wits, for his companions had asked him for 
an opinion of a law point and he now felt that 
he had given a foolish reply. On consulting 
the reports I found that my master had not 
been very drunk after all. The question that 
had been raised at the neighbors was, whether 
an heir to an estate could bring action for 
damages the estate had sustained before it 
actually came into his possession, he being the 
legal heir apparent? 

My dear, Xemines, I must give you rest 
from these small matters, by telling you now 
in rapid succession of four large events; I 
may call them the four dark days of all the long 
years. In their books the Egyptians and the 
Persians tell of days when the sun did not 
shine, but showed a black, sullen face ; when 
the wild bird flew to its nest, and the cattle 
bellowed and groaned in the fields. Be these 
stories true or not, dark days came to our 
house. First came the divorce of the wife and 



A ROMAN HOME. 75 

mother, Terentia. On a certain day, only five 
years ago, this wife and mother bade Tullia 
farewell, and left the home where she had been 
through all the period of her girlhood and 
middle life. I saw little reason for such a 
crisis in the house. I am positive that the 
event came so gradually that all the parties — 
the husband and wife and daughter, were al- 
ready reconciled to it when it came really to 
pass. My master had had many great trials, 
and under them was growing old. He needed 
perfect peace in his home, and constant praise 
from all. Terentia managed badly all the 
money matters. She never praised in any 
manner her famous husband ; but on the 
opposite, set up an opposition of feeling, if I may 
so speak. Cicero was himself so great that he 
filled the house to such a degree that there was 
no room for another. Tullia was full of 
demonstration over all her father's speeches 
and writings ; and as she drew ever nearer her 



CLUB ESSAYS. 



father the mother to that degree receded. By 
degrees Terentia began to look away toward 

the house of her own father as offering her an 

asylum, and with the large dowry handed 
back to her, which she had brought Cicero in 
her youth, she went away from our villas for- 
ever. It is a good quality of Roman law that 
a man who puts aside his wife must first restore 
to her the dowry she brought him in her days 
of youth and beauty. She could not come 
rich and go away poor. 

Xo sooner had our home circle recovered 
from this calamity than there came the great- 
est one that could have assailed the tender 
heart of my master. Tullia suddenly died. 
In about her twentieth year, this daughter, 
whom he had called the "honey sweet," took 
away from earth her blessed face and lan- 
guage. 

She had been married, but yet her father's 
home was almost all the time cheered by her 



A ROMAN HOME. 77 



presence ; and when the word came from her 
sickroom that the disease had become suddenly 
alarming, the grief of the illustrious father 
was most extreme. Death came very sudden- 
ly. All the deep philosophy of my master 
failed him. Letters from all the great men 
of the land came to him, bearing all forms of 
consolations, and some full of reproof that 
such a statesman should be so broken down by 
the death of only a daughter. But letters 
brought no softening of the affliction. We 
withdrew to our villa of Astura, because, be- 
ing upon an island it offered the broken heart 
two blessings — security against the intrusion of 
man, and the presence of all the sweetness of 
nature. Here, in this lonely place, my mas- 
ter did not even desire my presence any long- 
er, but alone, every morning, he would walk 
away to the woods, and would not, perhaps, 
until evening emerge from their sympathetic 
shadows. He was also alone much in his 



CLUB ESSAYS. 



library, and, entering it in his absence, I 
would find on his table outlines of monuments 
and forms of epitaphs. His heart, unable 
any longer to look forward, was thus looking 
back. Life has been awfully injured when it 
looks only back. 

The tragic fate of Csesar soon followed to 
conceal the tomb of the " honey sweet daugh- 
ter." All the patriots, and all the rivals of 
Caesar, too, had feared that the Ides of March 
would see him declared King. The friends of 
this royal movement had pretended to find 
oracular dictates that only a King could con- 
quer the Parthians. As the Ides drew near, 
the city became restless and suspicious in all 
ways at once. On the morning of the Ides 
we all went to the Senate. By noon Cicero 
and I, his servant, were in our places, anx- 
ious, but uncertain. My master knew of no 
conspiracy. All began to wonder that Caesar 
did not come to preside, for there seemed to 



A BOMAN HOME. 79 

be business awaiting transaction. I learned 
that night that Caesar had resolved, as by 
mere accident, to stay at home until the much 
talked of Ides should have passed by. That 
morning his wife had told him that she had 
dreamed that he had come flying to her in the 
night, saying, "Save me!" This helped de- 
tain Csesar. He had also gone out in the gar- 
den in the morning to note how his doves and 
pheasants would fly when he should feed them 
or call them. They came up on his left hand. 
This also helped him in his resolution to let 
that day pass by in the most possible of retire- 
ment. The conspirators, finding the day pass- 
ing and that their victim would perhaps not 
come to the forum, made out a pressing de- 
mand for the imaginary King, and sent down 
a messenger to Cassar's house, telling him that 
a case of importance was being argued, and 
that the Senate would be gratified if he would 
come and preside. He at once dismissed his 



80 CLUB ESSAYS. 



secret forebodings, and ordering out his litter, 
entered and was borne along to the assembly. 
To a watchman on the street he remarked 
pleasantly : "Ah, friend, the Ides of March 
have come, and have brought no trouble." 
"Conie, but not gone," was the reply. 

Seated upon his Chair of State in the Curia 
Pompeii, Caesar asked that the case be at once 
presented. Tullius Cimber then said that he 
had a brother in exile whom he would now 
petition the Senate to recall; and while plead- 
ing for this brother he grew more and more 
earnest, and at the end of each sentence took a 
step forward as though he would lay his affec- 
tionate pleadings upon the very breast of 
Julius. Other Senators, too, began to speak 
as though the case were one of tremendous 
importance; and as they spoke they, too, 
moved gently forward. It is my own impres- 
sion, dear Xi mines, that they overdid their 
earnestness, and that Caesar's heart suddenly 



A ROMAN HOME. 81 

divined that the eloquence was full of some- 
thing more terrible than the exile of Cimber's 
brother. Caesar arose from his seat, but in 
an instant the dagger of Casca gleamed and 
came down. I heard the dead sound of the 
blow. In his fearful tremulousness, Casca 
had struck his grand victim only in the 
shoulder blade. Ca?sar grasped the dagger, 
and screamed forth in a bud voice, " Casca, 
you villian, what means this?" While we all 
gazed, horror-stricken, suddenly other daggers 
gleamed and struck, and the great man, mut- 
tering some pathetic words which I could not 
catch, fell heavily upon the floor. Some relate 
that he said, "And thou, Brutus!" Others 
told me next day that when he saw Brutus 
raise his dagger, he said, ' c And my son! 
Brutus!" It had long been rumored that 
Brutus was a son of Caesar. 

In a few days after this thrilling event, my 
master began to say that it was a great over- 



82 CLUB ESSAYS. 



sight in the Republicans not to have slain 
Antony; that he was more willing to be a 
despot than Julius had been, and that had the 
conspirators invited him (Cicero) to their lib- 
erty feast, there was one dish that would not 
have been carried away un carved. My mas- 
ter despised and feared Mark Antony. I must 
close this letter, dear Xi mines, by telling you 
how this enmity soon hurried my Cicero out 
of life. When Antony and Octavius and 
Lepidus formed the second Triumvirate, and 
deceived the people by giving them three ty- 
rants instead of one, each two of the Trium- 
virs conceded to the other the privilege of 
putting to death his greatest enemy. Lepidus 
demanded Lucius Caesar; Octavius demanded 
Paulus; Antony asked the life of Cicero. 

We were at the Tusculum villa. A messen- 
ger came in fearful haste, his horse almost 
falling from fatigue. Cicero and his brother 
went out to meet him, and in a few moments 



A ROMAN HOME. 83 



came back into the great hall. Cicero said to 
me, calmly: "Antony lias condemned me to 
death." My heart sunk. I was in a moment 
glad that Tuliia had passed to the grave, which 
has no fresh sorrow. A group of servants 
were called, both boatmen and porters, and, 
having gotten ready the most essential things, 
we hurried to Astura, one of my master's 
villas, a few stadia away. Should we reach 
that point, from there we should sail for Mace- 
donia. But there was little hope of a final 
escape from the wide domain of Rome. The 
road was literally sprinkled with our tears. 
"When we halted, each stood with an arm 
around his friend, and Cicero and his brother 
embraced each other many times, and bade 
many farewells ; for, in my master, friendship 
was as vast a thing as learning or eloquence. 
We sailed from Astura, but, after a day out 
in rough weather, Cicero grew sick, and at the 
same time he felt a great longing to risk his 



81 CLUB ESSAYS. 



native land, or die upon its soil. He made 
our seamen sail into a harbor where we had a 
villa, and there we all disembarked. The 
porters took up the litter and bore him to our 
beautiful Formian house. Here we had known 
happy times in the past. When we had got- 
ten into the ample hall, he said, "Let me die 
here, in the country I have attempted so often 
to save." He lay down to sleep. It was the 
7th of December. In only a few moments, 
servants came in from remote parts of the 
farm, saying that horsemen were coming 
toward the house. The porters did not wait 
for the order or even the permission of Cicero, 
but, affectionately taking him up, they laid 
him in the litter, and told him they must go back 
to the ship. We had advanced only a hun- 
dred paces, when the assassins closed up around 
the baffled group. The slaves set down the 
litter. Cicero parted the curtains, and reach- 
ing out his head, gray with age and trouble, 



A SOMAN HOME. 85 



he addressed one of the pursuers by name, 
and said: " Strike me, if you think it is 
right." The bloody men halted an instant. 
The face before them was calm and noble. 
The hearts conscious of guilt faltered, but 
only for an instant. Herrennius, who had 
dismounted, stepped forward, and, with a half 
dozen ill-aimed and cruel blows, he severed 
the head from the body. The body remained 
in the litter; the head rolled oyer on the earth 
beneath. The hands, too, were cut off and 
were borne to Antony, who ordered them to be 
fastened up in the Forum, where the lips and 
hands, too, had been so eloquent against kings. 
My dear Ximines, I heard this match- 
less speaker deliver more than thirty great 
orations, and I have read all his books and 
letters, and am thus familiar with the utter- 
ances, public and private, of his great soul, but, 
to my memory, no words of his come now with 
more significance or beauty than those uttered 



86 CLUB ESSAYS. 



in the last clays of his life: "I try to make 
my enmities transient, and my friendships 
eternal." 

Your friend, 

Tiro. 
Tusculttm Villa, Dec, 19. 
[A. U. C. 710.] 



PARLEZ VOUS FRAN9AIS? 



PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 

The studies of youth, and, indeed, of all the 
life of man, have more than one object. It 
would be a sufficient warrant for hours of daily 
reading and methodical observation should we 
think only of the high pleasure such labor 
brings. But long before such pleasure is 
thought of by the pupil or the instructor, books 
are placed before the mind from a sense of the 
absolute utility of reading and writing and 
arithmetic. To this most general and obvious 
reason for school days must be added one more 
immense reason for this long sojourn among 
the languages and the sciences — the mental 
powers which result from such sojourn. Edu- 
cation, as a word, involves this idea, for it im- 
plies neither pleasure nor stores of informa- 
tion, but a developing of the mental germs 
' (89) 



90 CLUB ESSAYS. 



and tendencies. The mind is created full of 
tendencies or aptitudes, and under the influ- 
ence of daily use these tendencies develope 
into great forces. The soul of the Indian girl 
contains a tendency toward a love of the beau- 
tiful. She will prefer a wild flower to a stone 
or a stick, and will enjoy a local love song to 
quite a high degree. This aptitude in the 
natural wild girl can be enlarged in successive 
generations until we have, instead of this In- 
dian maid, a De Stael, or a Charlotte Bronte, 
or a Mrs. Browning. By this jDroeess of en- 
larging by use, a muttering red man becomes 
a Cicero or a Tacitus, or a flowing writer 
or an exquisite artist. In pursuing, for thou- 
sands of years, this work of evoking mental 
forces, two inquiries have attended the advanc- 
ing race — what studies do most strengthen the 
mind ? and what kind of information is of most 
absolute value? It is perfectly safe to say that 
no answer has yet come to these questions. It is 



PARLEZ VOUS FRANCA1S? 91 

perhaps equally safe to say that none ever will 
come, it being probably true that there are 
many studies of equal merit, just as there are 
thousands of landscapes of equal sweetness, 
and thousands of faces and forms of equal 
beauty. 

For many centuries it has been assumed, 
that the study of the dead languages, that is, 
the dead great languages — Latin and Greek, 
and of the higher mathematics, is the labor 
which gives best results, the exercise which 
turns a plowboy into an orator or a statesman 
or a philosopher. College courses have been 
run amid these three shapes of toil and infor- 
mation, and it came to pass long ago, that a 
mind not reared upon this strong food was 
deemed still an infant, having known only the 
weakness that comes from a diet of diluted milk. 
That power of prejudice, the power of what has 
long been, over the frail form of wdiat might 
be, which we see in old medicine, or old relig- 



92 CLUB ESSAYS. 



ion, or old politics, re-appears in old education, 
and a scholar or a thinker without the help of 
Latin and Greek was as impossible as a state 
without a king, or a salvation without a cler- 
gyman. The feeling in favor of the classic 
course has not been all a prejudice, for that was 
and is a noble course of mental progress, but 
it was a prejudice so far as it denied the value 
of all other forms of mental industry, and 
failed to perceive that what the human mind 
needs is exercise and not necessarily Greek 
exercise or Latin exercise. A special must 
not thus dethrone a universal. A king may 
be a good governor, but his courtiers and sons 
and daughters must not overrate the crowned 
man and predict the utter failure of any na- 
tion that may ever dare attempt to live with- 
out the help of a throne and royal children. 
Evidently the greatest, widest truth, is that the 
mind is made more powerful by exercise, and 
it will always be a secondary consideration 



PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 93 

whether this exercise shall come by loading the 
memory with the words and forms found in 
several languages, by compelling the judgment 
to work continually amid the many possibilities 
of syntax and translation, or shall come by a 
direct study of facts and causes and laws, as 
found in science and history and literature. 

It favors the classic course amazingly that 
no other course of mental development has 
ever been attempted in what is called 
the great era — the Christian era; but it might 
well shake our opinion, the thought that the 
Greeks and Latins became great without being 
fed exclusively upon a diet of grammars and 
dictionaries and mathematics. Biehter asks, 
"Whither do those sunflowers turn which 
grow upon the sun ? " So may we ask, what 
made mighty those children that were born into 
the classic tongues? What made the man Per- 
icles and the man Plato? and the women 
Sappho and Aspasia? What seven years' course 



94: CLUB ESSAYS. 



had they in dead languages? There can be 
but one answer, and that must be that the 
mind is made powerful and great by all far- 
reaching after the truths and fancies around 
it — by a constant and loving effort to enlarge 
its powers and accumulations. Pericles and 
Plato and Cicero and Humboldt and Mill and 
Webster and Clay were educated by intellect- 
ual toil and hope and zeal in their adjacent 
worlds, whatever those worlds may have been. 
The class-rooms of Oxford and Cambridge 
are, indeed, good worlds for the forming mind 
to master, but not many of the eagles of genius 
have, comparatively speaking, taken in such 
linguistic schools their first lessons in lofty 
flight. All the ages are school-houses, and the 
great men have been those who never played 
truant nor shirked, but who loved the school- 
house, whether it was by the Nile, under 
Rameses, or at Athens, under Pericles, or at 
Oxford, under Elizabeth or Victoria. 



PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 95 

The Latin and Greek tongues once pos- 
sessed an inestimable worth, because there was 
little of broad and powerful thought outside 
of those two literatures, and within them there 
were a power and beauty not yet perhaps sur- 
passed. Soon after the opening of the Chris- 
tian drama, the human mind became enslaved 
by a politico-religious government, which dis- 
couraged all thought, except that which tended 
to establish a throne and mark out an expen- 
sive way to a strange heaven, or a still more 
strange hell. Mind grew narrower and weaker 
as the centuries passed by. Scholars were con- 
tent to write the life of some ascetic monk, and 
to fill up with miracles a life that had been 
empty of both usefulness and food. Far along 
in the clouded periods, when some of the 
monks happened upon Latin and Greek books, 
it was as though the deaf had begun to hear, 
the blind to see, and the dumb to speak. Com- 
pared with a biography of some whining 



96 CLUB ESSAYS. 



zealot, whose glory lay in the scarcity of his 
food, and in the abundance of his personal 
dirt, the poems of Homer and Virgil, and the 
orations of Cicero and the meditations of Plato, 
were full of almost divine beauty, and thus 
exalted by a value both intrinsic and relative, 
Latin and Greek ascended the throne in the 
great kingdom of mind and sentiment. No 
broader or freer literature than the old classic 
thought has ever existed. From Homer to 
Tacitus there was freedom of the mind. No 
church or state told the thinkers what to think 
or express. Indeed each ruler was himself a 
scholar of his period, and, republic or empire, 
the state was always literary in its tastes and 
works. The rulers and statesmen were all 
poets or orators and philosophers, with full 
permission to select any theme, and to say upon 
it whatever pleased the hand that held the 
pen. Through the Latin and Greek gates 
there rushed out upon the dark Christian ages 



PARLE Z VOUS FRANCAIS? 97 

a stream of intellectual liberty and power. 
Out of stones so noble, the colleges and uni- 
versities, winch, now reckon their ages by cen- 
turies, built up their greatness of merit and 
fame, and our age will never be able to express 
too much gratitude toward thoseold states which 
furnished the new epoch with such founda- 
tions of mental and spiritual development. 

We come now to a universal phenomenon — 
that of the pupil excelling the master. Moses 
was surpassed by Daniel and Isaiah. Watts 1 ' 
engine is superseded. The man who taught 
music to Beethoven is forgotten in the splen- 
dor of his humble student. Modern Europe 
has moved far beyond old Greece, and in the 
modern languages and literature and sciences, 
all said and thought of on the coast of the old 
Mediterranean finds its amazing equivalent. 
Once the roll of human greatness read thus : 
Homer, Hesiod, iEschylus, Euripides, Peri- 
cles, Plato, Virgil, Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus, and 
7 



9S CLUB ESSAYS. 



the splendor of the catalogue none will have 
the rashness to deny ; but in the later cen- 
turies the book so long sealed has been 
opened, and there have been added Dante and 
Milton and Shakspeare and Goethe and Schil- 
ler, and such thinkers as Bacon and Newton, 
and such students as Cuvier and Humboldt 
and Muller and Darwin and Huxley and 
Agassiz. By these enormous additions the 
equilibrium of the old earth has been disturbed, 
and a side, which once lay in perpetual shad- 
ow, enjoys now a long summer-time. The 
buried palms and ferns of the Arctic latitude 
tell us that what is now the North Pole, and 
the region of almost lifeless frost, was once a 
land upon which the warm sun shone, and 
over which hot thunder-storms passed. Some 
external force came to make the planet re- 
volve upon some new inclination of its axis, 
and to remand to night and ice a continent 
which had once enjoyed the seasons, which 



PARLEZ VOUS FRANC AIS? 99 

now bless America or France. Into the in- 
tellectual world came a wonderful company of 
modern princes — a Newton, equalling a Plato, 
and a Shakspeare balancing all antiquity; 
and, under the heavy footsteps of all these 
moderns, the earth has been whirled about, 
and a longer and deeper shadow falls upon 
the land, where Demosthenes once thundered, 
and Sappho once sang. With this tipping 
over of the earth, the Greek and Roman lands 
lost their exclusiveness of empire, and were 
invited to become only brotherly states in a 
world-wide republic. The reasons for the 
long, patient study of those old tongues have, 
in part, thus passed away, since they are no 
longer the languages, which contain the most 
or the best of human learning and thought. 
As acquisitions and as mental exercises, those 
languages will always be valuable, but this 
will take place henceforth, in a world where 
other studies, equally valuable in all respects, 



100 CLUB ESSAYS, 



will present their claims to the student, old or 
young, abounding in wealth or pinched by 
poverty. As language is made up of em- 
balmed ideas, the modern tongues must be 
confe?sed to be powerful rivals of Greek and 
Latin, for the world having grown larger 
since Homer and Virgil, the modern tongues 
contain more ideas than were held by all the 
ancient kingdoms and republics. 

Xot only is it questionable whether the 
dead languages should any longer outrank, as 
studies, the great modern dialects, but it is 
also a matter of grave doubt whether an argu- 
ment can be framed in support of the educa- 
tional theory which devotes years, early and 
late, to the study of any of the forms of speech, 
ancient or modern. It may seem a form of 
mortal sin — a sin beyond the reach of masses 
and holy water — to confess that there exists, 
under Heaven, any such doubt, and yet some- 
thing must be said on this linguistic mania, 



PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 101 

even though the utterance should prove most 
amazing and unwelcome. Language in es- 
sence is a catalogue of names. Words are the 
names of things and of actions. If iEschyius 
spoke of kumaton anarithmaton gelasma, he 
saw and embalmed in sound the beautiful 
truth of nature, and the merit lies not in the 
sounds of the vowels and consonants, but in 
the genius that saw, in the morning ripple of 
the sea, " the numberless smiles of the waves." 
What the human soul needed was some one 
able to lay upon the broad ocean that 
sweetness of expression which had been 
sought for and found only upon the lips and 
face of woman. If a smile is a sudden flash 
of light and kindness, then what an interper- 
ter of the ocean is he who first tells us to look 
out upon its wide-spread and delicate smilings! 
But it is not the language that is so great; it 
is the sudden spiritualizing of the ocean. 
Language is only a name for the strange 



102 CLUB ESSAYS. 



beauty of the water, and, hence, it is of no con- 
sequence whether the name be " kumaton 
anarithmaton gelasma" or the " sea's innum- 
erable smile," or the " many twinkling smile of 
the waves," or whether the Frenchman, or Ger- 
man, or Spaniard bedecks the simile with his 
raiment of words and syntax. The expression 
uttered by the Greek poet becomes the world's 
single fact and property, and the possession 
of a hundred languages by any one individual 
will not add anything whatever to that 
morning and evening radiance of the Atlantic 
or Pacific. When we who had spent seven 
years over Greek, first stood upon the sea-shore, 
our hearts asked the old dead tongue to help 
us estimate that infinite scintillation of the 
flood ; and did we not, all of us, bless God 
that He had permitted us to study Greek? 
Did we not feel that all who had not read the 
"Prometheus" in the orioinal were cut off 
from nature, as though born blind? What a 



PARLEZ VOUS FBAXCAIS? 103 

mistake of a name for a substance! for now 
when all we ex-denizens, far away at last from 
college Avails, happen upon the beach, and 
look out upon the blue, we ask for no more 
blessed expression of the scene than our own 
tongue can bring us in its powerful sounds, 
"the numberless smiles of the waves." Goethe 
expressed the same thought in the German, 
Lamartine in the French; and thus let the 
speech change a thousand times, there is only 
the one thought hidden away in the varied 
accents. 

In any one of the great modern tongues 
there is now stored away all the facts of the 
earth up to this date. If Virgil asked us to 
note the beauty of the moon at midnight, when 
it passes in and out amid fleec} 7 clouds, we so 
do, and our heart is happy or sad, as was his, 
it being of no importance that he called the 
planet "luna" while we call it "moon" and 
that he called "nubila" those masses which 



104 CLUB ESSAYS. 



we call "clouds." Compared with the gran- 
deur of the scene, all these variations of the 
vowels and intonations are things of childish 
importance. It might, therefore, easily come 
to pass that the student, young or old, may, in 
the study of many tongues, be giving years of 
time to accidental matters, instead of to those 
facts of being and action which are the per- 
manent and valuable estate of man. A cer- 
tain Roman orator we call Cicero. In his own 
day he may have been called Tullius. Inti- 
mate friends may have called him Marcus. 
We do not now know how his family pro- 
nounced the "c" or the "u." But let it be 
true that this lawyer had three names, and that 
there are many possible ways of uttering those 
names, the one fact only remains valuable — the 
man himself. As such he has entered into 
the world's intellectual and moral riches, and 
we have him, be we German or French or 
English, in our lip and tongue service. Com- 



PARLEZ VOUS FBANCAIS? 105 

pared with this gold of possession, all else is 
dust. To compare the thoughts of this lofty 
Roman with the thoughts of Burke and Pitt 
and Sumner, in the arena of political study; 
to pass over to morals, and compare him with 
Puffendorf and Spencer ; to pass to religion, 
and compare him with Wesley or Stuart Mill 
or Jefferson ; to pass to rhetoric, and compare 
his mode of argument with that of Fox or 
Webster or Clay — would be to be engaged 
in pursuits greater than a mastery of these 
tongues, in which all these widely separ- 
ated minds may have done their sincere 
thinking in the sight of man and God. Their 
words, like their clothing or their food, were 
local and incidental. Indeed, of less im- 
portance than the food these chieftains ate, 
for that food might be good for us to imitate 
or avoid, whereas it is of little value to us that 
Cicero called that being Deus whom we call 
God, and that quality "pietas" which we call 



106 CLUB ESSAYS. 



"piety." It is the unchanging contents of the 
earth man must chiefly seek, and so brief is 
life that its lamp burns out before ^e have 
read the great volume of events and experi- 
ences, and no time is left for the study of those 
strange marks and sounds in which Egyptian 
or Persian or Athenian or Koman may have 
made record of his life or vrisdom or sen- 
timent, A hundred languages have passed 
away, in all of which the golden rule was 
putting forth its slow leaves, and men care 
not with what gutturals or labials or aspi- 
rates the first moralists began to express 
the worth to society of brotherly love. As 
man himself has come alono; over lands which 
have become deserts, passing in and out 
of temples and homes which have become 
dust, and falling into tombs which have no 
stone and by which no flower blooms, and yet 
he is here to-day in divine splendor; so truths, 
like the law of love, have come along, ^t(p|>in^ 



PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 107 

from language to language, and then leaving 
to decay or neglect the stairway of their long 
ascent. So subordinate is language to idea 
that the Christian world, which, rests its hope 
upon the beatitudes of Jesus, does not know 
in what speech He first said, " Blessed are the 
pure in heart." As the sea changes its shore 
line, and leaves far inland temples which once 
stood where the solemnity of the waves joined 
in the worship, and yet it is the same sea, flow- 
ing and re-flowing in tide and storm, so hu- 
manity leaves as dead and abandoned its old 
shores of speech, and along some new coast of 
forms and sounds flows and re-flows with a 
tide of wisdom and emotion rising higher as 
the ages pass. Each great language, English, 
French, German, is the present shore of the 
living sea, and if born into one of these 
tongues, that tongue is for you or me a measure- 
less main. It is the aggregate of the past six 
thousand years. 



108 CLUB ESSAYS. 



Do I speak French? Xot yet have I 
learned the universe hidden away in the lan- 
guage of my birth and soul. When you have 
caught up with the world's facts, then, if time 
remains, you might ask what the Frenchman 
would call those facts. After having studied 
the life, the tendencies, the loves of the sun- 
worshipers and the Egyptians ; after having 
seen the Queen of Sheba journeying to behold 
the greatness of Solomon ; after having com- 
mitted to memory the sublime chants of Job; 
after an inquiry into old liberty and old bond- 
age, and into old science and art, it might be 
of interest to know what letters and sounds a 
Frenchman would use in expressing the 
world's history, but to know all about the 
wanderings of Ulysses and his son is the thing 
to be desired more than the information that 
the French called the father Ulysse and the 
-•'ii Telemaque, 

Let it be conceded that persons who are to 



PARLEZ VOUS FRAXCA1S? 109 

devote all their life to intellectual pursuits 
have time for mastering several of the great 
dialects, ancient and existing; it yet remains 
a fair inquiry, what quantity of this linguistic 
work may enter into those courses of study, 
over which the multitude must pass. Must 
young persons who have only one idea learn 
ten ways of expressing it? Or must this per- 
son, often a beautiful girl, find ten ideas in 
the grand language of her native land? 
What made a Rubenstein was not a score of 
pianos, but it was genius and labor, practicing 
upon one adequate instrument. It is well 
known that, when some years ago certain 
thousands of families, men and women, were 
flying before a great conflagration, one citizen 
was seen to remove from his library nine vio- 
lins of all ages and pedigrees — a scene made 
laughable, even at such a gloomy time, by the 
equally well known fact that this lover of the 
fiddle could not, from any or all of the strings, 



110 CLUB ESSAYS. 



elicit more than the one-ninth part of a tune. 
As the cart-load of instruments moved on- 
ward toward a place of safety, even the best 
friends of the amateur could not help wishing 
that the noble gentleman had less of fiddle 
and more of music. In the department of 
fashionable education a similar event may be 
detected in the fact that many young persons 
are learning more ways of expressing thought 
than they have thoughts to express, and in- 
stead of having ten ideas of value, they give 
promise of reaching, at last, ten methods of 
stating one idea, and perhaps a small one at 
that. For suppose your beautiful daughter 
of seventeen years has, by much toil and ex- 
pense, learned to say in five tongues, "He 
has the pretty yellow dog;" in Greek: Ehei 
kalon chloon leuna; in Latin : Ilabet helium 
canem gilvum; in French: II a unjoli chien 
dejaune; in German: Er hat der schon gelb 
hund; and could she by industry find the 



PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? Ill 

Chinese and Zulu vowel sounds, used by those 
remote peoples, to convey that idea of proper- 
ty in an animal, it would be well for the girl 
and parent to remember that, amid all this 
variety of speech, there is only the same yel- 
low dog all the time. Under some other the- 
ory of education, the mind might have mas- 
tered the whole science of Cuvier, and have 
moved away from the yellow dog to study the 
whole animal kingdom, from the elephants of 
India to the garden-making birds of the trop- 
ics, and the bank-swallow of America. The 
poor man, in the cold of mid-winter, does not 
need ten shovels with which to put one ton of 
coal into the scuttle, but what he craves is ten 
tons of coal and one good shovel. It might be 
of interest to him to know the shape of a Russian 
or Hindoo scoop, to gaze at the kind of instru- 
ment by which the Hebrews put wheat into a 
sack, or apples into an ox-cart, but the high- 
est happiness of the multitude will always 



112 CLUB ESSAYS. 



come more from the coal they may possess in 
December, than from any collection they 
might covet of old and modern utensils of 
lifting and moving fuel from vault to grate. 
If the remark will not give any offense, it 
may be let fall here, that there are thou- 
sands of boys and girls, older and younger, 
whose ability to express thought has quite out- 
grown the thought they have on hand await- 
ing expression, and, having mastered a great 
many styles of saying things, they are finding 
themselves in the position of having nothing 
to say. When the lovely young lady, who 
had mastered her French and Italian and 
Spanish, was led by some machine-loving 
gentleman to gaze for a moment at the great 
engines, in the hydraulic works of Chicago, 
asked him, in her delight, whether the big- 
wheel was turned by men or by a horse, it 
gave him no peace that she could have put 
the inquiry into any one of the modern tongues. 



PARLE Z VO US FRANC AIS ? 113 

The question placed him, for a time, beyond 
the consolation of philosophy and religion. 

The prevailing idea among the upper Amer- 
ican classes that even their little children 
must learn French, and to that end must 
speak it at the table, is highly blamable, for 
reasons more than one. It is based upon en- 
tire ignorance of the fact that it will require 
the life-time of each mortal to master the 
language of his birth and country. All the 
young years given by Americans to the study 
of French, are years turned away from the 
greatest language yet known to man. All 
the acquisitions of the human race, all the 
sciences, and arts, and histories, and senti- 
ments of humanity have passed into the Eng- 
lish tongue. Each word stands for an idea, 
and in each great modern dialect all ideas re- 
appear. He that has perfectly mastered his own 
language has a store of information immense 
in bulk and rich in value. To excavate many 



m CLUB ESSAYS. 



channels for a river is to lessen the unity and 
power of the stream otherwise majestic. It 
will always be proof of some blunder of judg- 
ment, or of some stubborn vanity, when Amer- 
icans will be found using a little French, and 
German, and Italian, who have not mastered 
the English of William Wirt, or of Tennyson, 
or of the eloquent Ruskin. It is not languages 
man needs, but language. It is not a room 
full of violins, but the power to make music. 
It is therefore simply painful to hear a fash- 
ionable girl or woman or man, combining sev- 
eral languages in conversation when the listen- 
er knows well that this bright talker could 
not by any possibility compose an essay in the 
English of Washington Irving, or Charles 
Sumner, or the poet Whittier. While they 
have trifled with grammars and lexicons, or 
have said elegantly this or that compliment 
of the season, their own grand English has 
moved away from their mind and heart just 



PAELEZ VOUS FBANCAIS? 115 

as husband and home at last disappear from 
the world of the artful beauty, leaving in her 
possession the old faded bouquets and the old 
yellow cards of invitation to dinner or to dance 
— invitations sent and accepted long ago, when 
the forehead was smooth and the lips red. 

A modern language is a prodigious affair. 
All will admit that as a system of sounds for 
expressing truths the Greek language has no 
equal, but it comes short in just this particu- 
lar — that the Greeks had not as much to ex- 
press as the Germans and French and English 
now have in their keeping. An island has 
become a continent, a river has widened into 
a sea. Each of these three modern tongues 
holds in its embrace a universe, while Greek 
held only a star. To master one of these new 
forms of speech is the task of a life, and happy 
the American who shall ever reach in his own 
tongue the ease and skill reached in their own 
tongue by Chateaubriand and Lamartine, and 



116 CLUB ESSAYS. 



by Castelar in his dialect, or by Schiller in the 
rich German. Such a result cannot be reached 
by attempts to study the words of Lamar tine 
and Goethe, but by studying the same universe 
as that which enveloped them, and by com- 
pelling our own English harp to play for us 
all our sincere and passionate music. It must 
be that the popularity of French comes from 
a forgetfulness of the absolute immensity of 
the English language — an immenseness which 
asks for many years of early and late study, 
and which should so captivate each one born 
into its confines that, like the contented soul, 
one should never care to wander away from 
home. 

The chase after French must come from the 
want of thought as to the greatness of our own 
speech, and hence must be one of the popular 
delusions of the age, but there lies against this 
worship of French a separate objection. In 
our generation that nation is not coming to us 



PARLEZ VOUS FBAXCAIS? 117 

as Greece came, laden with deep and inspiring 
thoughts. Greek speech was once the speech 
of the world's greatest minds. We recall 
Plato and Aristotle and Thueydides, and that 
type of manhood. These were the men who 
projected Greek into the old courses of study. 
But that old type of manhood is now standing 
in England and Germany and America, and 
the French verbs and nouns and adjectives 
are coming to us only in the name of fashion 
and Paris. " Parlez vous Francais" simply 
means, "Have you seen Paris ?" Have 
you some of her dresses, her dramas, her wall- 
paper, her furniture, her luxury? A lan- 
guage which sets us ail wild for elegant cloth- 
ing and for handsomer furniture and for new 
shapes of wedding cards, and which so de- 
lights us at the drama, can never come in the 
dignity of those old classic verbs which never 
mentioned anything except the great emotions 
and exploits of the soul. The Greek showed 



118 CLUB ESSAYS. 



man human life in its wars and travels and 
rhetoric and logic and liberty and aesthetic 
yearnings, but the French of our boarding- 
schools does little for the average student, ex- 
cept enable hini or her to read the bill of fare 
at a fashionable hotel, and to call by the charm- 
ing name of buffet what once was a sideboard, 
and to buy and enjoy as an escritoire what had 
once been known as a writing-desk, and to feel 
wise over that progress which removes from 
a lady her work-table, and places before her a 
chiffoniere. So far as the study of this mod- 
ern dialect inflames the young heart in the 
direction of bills of fare and novelties for the 
parlor or dining-room, it can hardly compare 
favorably with the study of those classic forms 
which ignored the hotel-keeper and the cook, 
and introduced the student to Homer and 
Cicero. 

The world's facts and experiences being 
gathered up in language, there must needs be 



PAELEZ VOL'S FRAXCAIS? 119 

men skilled in different languages, that the 
goods of one land may be transported to an- 
other country. Thus Champollion became a 
transfer boat to ship Egyptian history and 
learning from hieroglyph to French. Others 
came to forward the goods from French to 
English. Immense is this carrying trade — 
Carlyle carried Goethe across the channel; 
Longfellow has brought Dante across the sea. 
But not all the educated need embark in this 
form of importation, for what we all need is 
not the key to the hieroglyphics on the old 
rocks, but the English of the things thus re- 
corded. The Sermon on the Mount is jour- 
neying around the world in two hundred 
tongues, but it is not an acquaintance with 
these forms the young or old soul needs, but 
the Sermon on the Mount in the native tongue 
of him who must live and die among its sub- 
lime lessons. Diamonds may be re-set, and 
having passed a generation upon a queen's 



120 CLUB ESSAYS. 



hand, they may be seen on the neck of 
her daughter, and at last be transferred to a 
coronet; but the essential value is in the 
glittering stones themselves, be they on fore- 
head or finger. It is not otherwise with the 
truths which man has evolved from his obser- 
vation and experience. They are all one, 
whether they are whispered to his ear by Eng- 
lish or Greek or Arabian lips, and blessed is 
he to whom some one of these great voices 
has come with its infinite utterances about 
time and the world called timeless. When, 
therefore, a distinguished clergyman declared 
that when a minister of the Gospel was not 
keeping well up in Greek he was losing the 
use of his right arm, he simply blundered 
along, for the right arm of an orator or states- 
man or thinker or preacher, can never be 
in any manner the power to read a foreign 
tvxt, but it must always be the power to ex- 
amine or establish a theme which does not 



PAELEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 121 



depend in the least upon the vowels and con- 
sonants of a time or place. Not a single 
great idea in the Bible is awaiting any new 
light from the linguist. The Greek and He- 
brew lexicons can do nothing toward answer- 
ing a single one of the problems of mankind ; 
can shed no light upon the existence of a God, 
or a life beyond, or upon the path of duty, 
and hence a long dwelling over those old forms 
cannot be the right arm of a clergyman. His 
inspiration must come from ideas mighty as 
the human race, and not from any wonder- 
ment what some particle may have implied 
when Moses was a lad, or when John was 
baptizing in the wilderness. 

Even when a whole life is given to one's 
native English or native French, so inadequate 
still is that language to express the soul that 
it seems a form of wickedness to divide the 
heart between many masters, and to have no 
supreme friend. Chateaubriand, the greatest 



122 CLUB ESSAYS. 



master of the French tongue, when he stood 
near the Niagara Falls almost a hundred 
years ago, and saw evening coming down from 
the sky upon all the sublime scene; saw the 
woods growing gloomy in the deep shadows, 
and heard the sound of the waters increasing 
its solemnity as the little voices died away in 
the night's repose, said ■ "It is not within the 
power of human words to express this grand- 
eur of nature." Skilled as he was in a most 
rich and sensitive form of speech, that sj)eech 
all of whose resources he knew so well, now 
failed him, and his spirit had to remain im- 
prisoned, there being no gateway by which 
its sentiments could escape to the heart of his 
countrymen. What are you and I to do, then, 
if we have not loved early, and late, and deep- 
ly our own English — that English which is 
now the leader in literature and all learning; 
if we have not mastered its words, its ele- 
gancies, its power of logic, and humor, and 



PARLE Z VOUS FRAXCAIS? 123 

pathos, and rythm; and have not permitted our 
minds to become rich in its associations; if 
we have for years gone along with a heart 
divided in its love, or with a mind that has 
studied words more than it has thought and 
prayed and laughed and wept amid the sub- 
lime scenes of nature, or the more impressive 
mysteries of mankind? "Parlez vous fran- 
cais?" Not well; not at all: would to 
Heaven we could even learn to speak English. 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 

The great writers of all times have held 
themselves well away from grave and formal 
discussion of the sentiment of love. Human- 
ity, charity, benevolence, friendship, have been 
subjected to abundant literary treatment, but 
the moralist and the general students of na- 
ture have for reasons, known and unknown, 
passed by in silence that tumult of the heart, 
which in youth writes love letters, sends gifts 
of flowers, quotes much poetry, grows sad and 
happy, thinks alternately of paradise and 
prison, and which sings and swears and laughs 
and sighs until the end is reached in a suicide 
or a wedding. Michelet has indeed furnished 
a treatise upon L' Amour, but his thoughts will 
be found grouped around only one single stage 
of this ailment, and around that stage only as 
(127) 



123 CLUB ESSAYS. 



seen in an idle French woman in her early mar- 
ried life. His book is the history of a day, and 
not of an epoch, and the picture of some one 
person, and not of the human heart. It will 
be the task, delightful and useful, of some 
Lecky or Draper to compose a history of this 
powerful passion, just as it was the task of 
Alger to compose a life of the notion of im- 
mortality, and as it was the work of Taylor to 
record a history of enthusiasm. Love is, in- 
deed, an enthusiasm, and also an immortality. 
Such a treatise has, no doubt, been kept 
back by a reluctance upon the part of profound 
thinkers to treat with dignity and soberness a 
sentiment so marred, as they imagine, by asso- 
ciation with guitars and perfumed envelopes 
and bouquets, and with adjectives and adverbs, 
but it is probable that our profound thinkers are 
as much over-dressed in their robes of dignity 
as our lovers are over-bedecked by their cloth- 
ing and their adjectives. The philosopher 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 129 

• 

may be guilty of two errors — lie may, per- 
haps, underrate the average quality of the love 
affair, and he may, to a similar degree, over- 
rate the virtues of himself. If there is not 
much in the average human heart, it is prob- 
able that in the head of the philosopher there 
may be an equal scarcity of things of real 
worth. Indeed, no supreme court has yet 
handed in its opinion that the human race, in 
its temple of religion or porch of intellectual 
research, is any greater than the same race in 
its wide and amazing subjection to this senti- 
ment of love. It is tacitly assumed that there 
is something very childish and silly in such 
seven-year courtships as those conducted by 
that character in the Bible, and by all similar 
waitings and longings, be they long or short, 
but there are no visible grounds for such as- 
sumptions, and hence the whole question of 
the fact and value and beauty of this one pas- 
sion lies before our times an open question. 



130 CLUB ESSAYS. 



Let us hope, therefore, that our era, which is 
more fond of tracing the natural history of an 
idea than the path of some captain or some 
king, will sooner or later furnish our libraries 
with a biography of that strange affection of 
the heart which has attacked, with more or 
less violence, all the mortals who have ap- 
peared upon this earthly scene. 

The career of this disturbance, which is 
both a convalescence and a decline, a blush of 
health and a pallor, a giant and an invalid, 
repeats the general theory of the new philoso- 
phy of development, for, in the barbaric races, 
love is as narrow and as humble as are the 
languages and the arts. In the savage tribes 
love exists only in a most elementary form. 
And, indeed, by barbaric, not only the Indian 
or the ncsto is meant, but also all that ex- 
panse of territory covered even by the songs 
of TTomer or of Solomon. Attachments be- 
tween man and woman were weak and epheme- 



TEE HISTORY OF LOVE. 131 

ral. The cruelty charged upon a Hebrew 
psalm-weaver on account of his having taken 
possession of the beautiful wife of one of his 
captains, is fully equalled by the willingness 
with which the wife passed over from the first 
fireside to the second. The tears shed over 
that affair did not fall in the Hebrew age; 
they have fallen in those later periods, which 
have reached a new appreciation of the word 
home, and the relations under its roof. Hel- 
en in Homer did not seem to care much in 
what tent she hung up her embroidered gar- 
ments. From the immortal song we learn 
that this same Helen was an ideal woman of 
that early Greek period. She was so exceed- 
ingly beautiful that about a score of chiefs 
began to quarrel over her when she was only 
ten years of age ; and when she was a little 
older, the great men of the land began to 
enlist armies that they might possess this ex- 
quisite jewel of a girl. All the female charms 



132 CLUB ESSAYS. 



and virtues known to Greece in that clay met 
in this one name, and therefore she stands as 
a mark to show us how high the sentiment of 
love ever rose in that epoch; and when we 
recall the apparent facility with which this 
representative woman attached herself to 
Theseus and Pirithous and Menelaus and 
Paris and Deiphobus, we must conclude that 
in her day, the sentiment of love must have 
been only a few removes from the parallel 
appetite in the kingdom of brutes. Compared 
with the modern Evangeline and Lucille, 
Helen was a poor specimen of high woman- 
hood. But she was on the same general level 
with the beauties which graced the low ha- 
rems of David and Solomon. 

Beyond doubt, dreams of something better 
came at times to those old periods. In Penel- 
ope, Homer seems to have had a prophetic 
vision of an ideal attachment, but Penelope 
was chained to the absent Ulysses more by 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 133 

politics than by romance, and, indeed, the 
wanderer would return, not so much to see her 
as his old love, as to save the little kingdom 
and the annual income. Penelope represented 
considerable property. Such chieftains as 
Ulysses held their petty kingdoms only by the 
law of might. The suitors who made night 
hideous in the palace were not pure worship- 
ers of beauty, but they were adventurers, on the 
look out for what the Queen was attempting 
to hold in the shape of money and lands. 
The fights in and around the palace, the efforts 
of Telemachus to expel the suitors, his subse- 
quent journey in search of his father, the re- 
turn of the lost hero, and his assault upon the 
men who were waiting for the hour for a suc- 
cessful coup d'etat, assure us that Penelope 
was standing guard, not simply over an old 
love affair, but over the property, real and per- 
sonal, of herself and Telemachus. In this 
story of the faithful Queen, we can detect, 



134: CLUB ESSAYS. 



therefore, only faint traces of such a friend- 
ship as was to be seen between man and woman 
in some subsequent date in Christian history. 
One of the early Greeks, coming just after 
the Homeric age, objects to marriage, on the 
ground that when a man takes such a partner 
he will be annoyed hj her wish to eat with 
him at his table. It was thus a form of calam- 
ity to haye at the same board what modern 
times would call the kind eyes and bright face 
of the wife. It must be avoided, and the true, 
philosophic mind must be slow to form a friend- 
ship which might make a companion of some 
beauty, who should be in the kitchen or in 
the garden while the noble husband should be 
breaking his bread and sipping his wine. If 
Lord Byron made the remark that he could 
not bear to see a woman eat, that fact would 
relegate him back to the low period just alluded 
to, for that desire for isolation from the society 
of noble womanhood is pretty well known to 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 135 

come from a quality of soul which does not 
love to look its victim in the face. It indi- 
cates that passions of a low order have risen 
in power above all the finer forms of thought 
and emotion, that words and the general ex- 
change of ideas are unable to bring any pleas- 
ure, and that woman, to be anything, must be 
only a party to a flirtation or a darker intrigue. 
What was exceptional in Lord Byron was a 
common sentiment in early Greece. The poet 
Simonicies, in a poem describing the different- 
kinds of women that had filed along before 
his point of review, tells us indirectly that in 
most of the classic homes there were domestic 
broils of a very extreme character — that the 
words, "Take thee for better or worse, &c, to 
love and cherish," had not yet come into the 
marriage relations of his generation. He men- 
tions the ugly woman as being one at whom 
men hoot and laugh in the street, thus plainly 
showing that the sentiment of love had not yet 



136 CLUB ESSAYS. 



learned to make any high, estimate of spiritual 
and mental qualities, and that Greece had no 
such chivalry and romance as may now be 
found in England and America, where woman 
is not laughed at on the street, and where a 
bright mind and a cheerful heart will rival 
the highest beauty in the art of entrapping a 
husband. 

When the Greeks had made a laughing- 
stock of all the homely women, they found 
another class equally worthy of ridicule — the 
class that was fond of personal decoration. 
This awful creature took baths daily, and made 
use of perfumed oils. She was such a barba- 
rian that she did her hair up in tresses, and 
was even so self-conceited as to put flowers into 
that well-combed hair. Such a woman, says 
the poet, will make her husband " familiar 
with poverty." In an ago when such senti- 
ments appeared in popular poetry, marriage 
I have been very much like the purchase 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 137 

of an ox or a horse — a careful study of the 
work to be done on the premises of the pur- 
chaser. But when Shnonides comes to con- 
template the tattling woman, the endless talker, 
he lets in a flood of light upon the relation of 
the husband to the so-called "partner of his 
joys." "Nor," says the poet, "can the hus- 
band stop her with threats, though in a rage 
he should knock out her teeth with a stone." 
How many blushing brides could have been 
found in old Greece with their front teeth thus 
wanting we have no way of learning, but we 
must confess that when a honeymoon is liable 
in the first families of the land to be followed 
by a loss of articles so useful and beautiful, 
and that, too, in an age which had no dental 
art of restoration, then, indeed, is the passion 
of love only ephemeral and brutal. Much as 
the nineteenth century may secretly wish that 
ladies sjiven to interminable clatter misdit in 
some way be deprived of those ivories which 



138 CLUB ESSAYS. 



help make the articulate sounds in question, 
yet so kind and romantic is the age that the 
man who would displace those talkative teeth 
with a rock cannot be found in our best so- 
ciety. 

Thus, if we may believe an old observer of 
old times, there were three groups of ladies 
that received from Greek gentlemen sneers 
and jeers, and not a few most violent blows 
with hand or club — the ugly woman, the dressy 
woman, and the tattling woman. What woman, 
then, was lovable in that far-off land? Very 
kindly the poet tells us, the real good woman 
is "like the busy bee ; under her care his liv- 
ing prospers and increases." The early Greek 
wife, then, w r as a classic squaw. From the 
condition of a bride she passed quickly to the 
drudgery of a slave or humble domestic. Just 
before marriage, the noble young man of the 
period perhaps smiled at the girl of his choice. 
She was happy to take off the military cap 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 139 

of her lover and put it on her own head, 
and walk all around the uncovered hero, and 
perhaps she said to him, "Am not I a pretty 
soldier ?" In answer, he would place his hand 
under her chin, and turn up the face until the 
eyelids fell down, covering the beautiful eyes 
with beautiful lashes, thus starting the prob- 
lem whether the eye of woman is handsomer 
when open or when shut. But after a few 
days of this lingering upon the borders of the 
earthly paradise the pair turned away, the 
husband to resume the character of domestic 
tyrant, and the wife to enter upon dreary 
years, full of all the possible sorrows of woman. 
Love was in those ages only a rudiment of a 
coming noble sentiment. It was Darwin's ape, 
from which a humanity was to come by slow 
steps. It was a wild olive, too bitter for human 
lips, but waiting for the cultivation of reason 
to make it rich and sweet for all who should 
come with the reason and the cultivation. 



MO CLUB ESSAYS. 



It is confessed by all students of the classic 
world that there prevailed through the thou- 
sand years of that kingdom a general pro- 
gress of all political and moral ideas and prac- 
tices. In such a wide progress this great 
friendship between man and woman actively 
participated, cases of deep and true love came 
into being, and noble ■ sentiments upon this 
subject began to sparkle in literature. In 
Sappho, love begins to speak in its native and 
powerful tongue, and all the better because it 
speaks not by masculine lips, but through 
these other lips which are most wont to spirit- 
ualize the words they utter. It is not fully 
known just who this Sappho was, nor just all 
that she said, but judging from the only evi- 
dence we possess, cither for or against the girl, 
we seem shut up to the conclusion that this 
poetess had begun to seethe sentiment of love 
in that higher light in which it is seen by our 
own Tennysons, and Longfellows, and Brown- 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 141 

ings. Not that she or her era reached in 
reality the life-long union of heart to heart, 
but that she and a few others saw, as in pro- 
phetic vision, a friendship — a companionship 
between man and woman which had not been 
formulated by Moses, or David, or Solomon, 
or Homer, or Simonides. 

In this woman from -Mitylene, in the sixth 
century before our era, the passion of love shows 
signs of becoming a poetic and romantic senti- 
ment — a branch of the eternal beauty. To 
the virtue of animal love is added the charm 
of a certain divine friendship, just as though an 
age was coming when a bride could hope to 
be the loved one of years, instead of the toy 
of a day. It is almost certain that Sappho 
was a woman of unrivaled mental power and 
personal attractiveness. She had the grasp 
and courage of Madame De Slael, and the ten- 
derness of Mrs. Browning. It is inferred that 
she soon gathered arouud her feet a group of 



142 CLUB ESSAYS. 



gifted folk, old and young, and that she 
and they flung out upon the world more ten- 
der literature than has escaped oblivion, and 
that the high ideals of friendship, certain 
glorias over undying attachments, formed the 
burden of this combined song. "What helps 
make Sappho stand at the gate of a new dis- 
pensation is the fact that, in her, woman began 
to sing upon a subject which had been treated 
by only the masculine branch of humanity. 
When the primitive man sings of love, then 
be on the lookout for coarseness. It was the 
primitive man, remember, who was wont to 
knock out the front teeth of the woman he 
had sworn to love and protect; it was the 
primitive man who feared his wife might de- 
sire to eat at his table; it was this masculine 
creature who reached the conclusion that an 
ugly woman might be laughed at in the street, 
and who anticipated the verdict of Thucydi- 
des that she is the best woman "Regarding 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 143 

whom the world knows nothing either good 
or bad," and it was a masculine judge of these 
matters who, in a land not Greek nor Roman, 
retailed to the public such low animalisms as 
those found by some mistake in a holy book, 
and called the Song of Solomon by men and 
women who would dislike to sing its peculiar 
images in good society. It has been the dis- 
position and inmost genius of woman to make 
her attachments spiritual and eternal. Virgil 
says: " Variable and mutable always is wom- 
an," but the probability that Virgil indulged 
here in a poetic license is very great, for, in 
the long page of history, w r e see man busy 
changing his mistresses and laying plans in 
politics or religion, by which he can bring the 
number of his female companions up to seven 
or eight hundred. Solomon's heart changed 
about eight hundred times, while the modern 
Mormon Chieftain called upon about fifty dif- 
ferent wives to show us what a great slander 



1W: CLUB ESSAYS 



had fallen from the lips of Virgil. Between 
the Mormon and the Hebrew lies a larsre area 
of time and territory, quite thickly settled by 
eminent men who could not, -without a blush, 
intimate that woman's love was ephemeral. 

Not only do the nature and taste of woman 
make her the natural advocate of a perpetual 
friendship with one person, but her interests 
come to reinforce her nature and taste. She can- 
not accumulate husbands bylaw or religion; she 
cannot, even by persuasion, entrap and retain a 
multitude of these precious articles. If she 
is able to captivate a single one, she is deemed 
fortunate. In the philosophy of losing this 
one in a month or a year she can take no part. 
If she haj caught an ugly one, she dares not 
laugh at him ; if she has caught a garrulous 
one, she dares not knock out his front teeth. 
Not every day can she have a new choice out in 
the wide field. Thus it was, from the earliest pe- 
riod of history, much to the personal interest of 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 145 

every bride to say to lier husband, " You shall 
be mine forever." In the poetess Sappho love 
therefore found the first powerful champion, 
and in her verse began to push out those wings 
which were to be emblems of immortality. 
Clay is, indeed, to be found in her thoughts, 
but there is more gold than clay, showing a 
great change from those dreary centuries when 
passion had more clay than gold. 

Led along by a new and immense quantity 
of love-song, made popular by Sappho and 
Corinna, and inflamed by a constant study of 
the beautiful in form, the Greeks, in the day 
of their glory, fell into a strange excess or 
fanaticism of passion, and wrote a chapter of 
history of which the civilized world is ashamed. 
It became the stupid dream of some of the 
greatest and best of the classics that all beauty 
of form and of motion was the pearl of great 
worth, and that, hence, an illustrious hero or 
scholar or statesman might select from the 
10 



14:6 CLUB ESSAYS. 



streets or from the slave market some graceful 
boy and make a Dulcinea for a few years of 
Lis form and face. It does credit to the heart 
of Grote, in his wonderful volumes on Plato, 
that he has spread over this habit of Athens 
that mantle of charity found in the words: "It 
was all a simple worship of the beautiful." 
One might wish that so great a name as that 
of Grote might put all doubt to sleep, but in 
that classic world there was so much vice, and 
what we should now call vulgarity, such abun- 
dant remains of the horrible and infamous, 
that not even the eloquence of Grote can make 
that age of pet boys other than a cloud upon 
Greek memory. After having caused to pass 
before our mind all that delight which, the 
Greek soul drew from all contact with the 
perfect in symmetry and feature, having re- 
called the fact that children having any blem- 
ish in limb or feature were not thought worthy 
of life, and that old persons were despised in 
Homeric and later days because they had lost 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 147 

their physical charms, haying recalled the 
truth that Greece was the Mother of the fine 
arts, and lost her state because she loyed too 
much her statuary and pictures and temples, 
and died because she had exchanged statesmen 
for artists, the feeling still remains that in that 
same glorious land this form of friendship, 
under review, was one of those dark vices 
which so mar all the nations of antiquity. 
Xenophon made no aesthetic defense of these 
boy companions, but in enumerating the crimes 
and vices of Menon, the general, he designates 
as infamous that form of friendship for which 
Mr. Grote apologizes as being a method of lov- 
ing the beautiful; and as Xenophon stood 
nearer than any English student to the facts, it 
seems necessary for us to conclude that some- 
times the classic devotion to the beautiful was 
like that religious zeal which has often wor- 
shiped God by means of vulgarity and cruelty, 
and even murder. But let us dismiss from 



148 CLUB ESSAYS. 



thought this subject, uncongenial to modern 
taste. 

Aspasia came to Athens to render woman 
more than ever an object of reverence, and thus 
her friendship more of a prize. Her picture 
must not be painted in the colors of the nine- 
teenth century, but in the full light of that 
period in human history, when the wife was a 
silent, patient slave, and when the true love was 
the toy of a spring and a summer. It was 
necessary that woman should assert herself, and 
take possession of what empire she might, as 
a queen. If she had been formed by the Cre- 
ator as a companion of man — a companion in 
thought and reason and sentiment, at the ta- 
ble and on the journey, and by the fireside, it 
was time some attention were called to such 
original significance of all affairs of the heart. 
At intervals great queens appeared, not to 
fight battles like the Amazons, but to lift love 
upward from passion to a high friendship, and 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 149 

make it a communion of kindred, but dissim- 
ilar, spirits, for whose united life all the years 
of earth were only too brief. By some freak 
of nature, or decree of Providence, there was 
born, at Miletus, a child which received the 
name Aspasia. In Miletus two streams of 
thought and learning met — Greek lore came 
to it from the West, Asiatic lore from the 
East. There Cadmus and Hecatacus and 
Anaximander and the great Thales were 
born, and, as a result, each gifted child born 
in that city was cradled in an awakening air. 
The young Aspasia was so beautiful that she 
became in girlhood the favored of all the dis- 
tinguished "Milesians;" and, as learning was, 
in that day and city, as essential as beauty, the 
favored girl was compelled to make her stud- 
ies bear some relation to the matchless ex- 
pression of her face. No reception, no sym- 
posium, no "coming with a few friends," was 
complete without the presence of this youthful 



150 CLUB ESSAYS. 



queen. Having reached early womanhood, her 
ambition grew with her growing mind, and her 
eye and heart turned toward that Athens which, 
lying across an arm of the Mediterranean, 
seemed brilliant in spiritual light, the light of 
philosophy, poetry and art. And just then the 
greatest of minds was ruling the most illus- 
trious of States. It was only natural for one 
who must have felt conscious of being the 
greatest of women, to desire to live in a city 
ruled by Pericles, whose eloquence and learn- 
ing and taste were making up for Greece its 
golden age. Perhaps it might be the happy 
destiny of this Milesian girl to see, to meet, 
perhaps even to speak to this Athenian states- 
man. 

In carrying out the idea that there was 
nothing valuable on earth except the Greek 
stamp were on the goods, Athens passed a 
law that only marriage with a Greek woman 
was lawful — that only purely Greek children 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE, 151 

were legitimate. Aspasia, then, could not 
marry in the narrow Athens. But great, 
powerful minds must have deeply felt the 
meanness of the law, and this girl from Miletus 
must have sailed from home with her mind 
more absorbed by the charms of learning and 
art and elevated society than by perplexity 
over the situation of foreign women in the 
domestic matters of this world. How long it 
was after the remarkable personage reached 
Athens before she had the happiness of meet- 
ing Pericles, and before Pericles had the par- 
allel honor of meeting Aspasia, the chronicles 
do not tell us, but enough is known in the 
simple fact that their hearts became one for 
life and death. The unlawful, but absolute, 
wife assisted the statesman in study, in com- 
position, in devising laws, in planning public 
buildings, and became a remarkable emblazon- 
ment on the sky of the divine idea that woman 
was created to be the full companion and 



152 CLUB ESSAYS. 



equal partner of her husband, and if this les- 
son was read to the Athenian libertines and 
wife-beaters by a woman who walked over a 
law perhaps already dead, it was only so much 
the worse for the law. Aspasia helped show 
the old world, and helped teach the nations 
now existing that love is a friendship between 
one man and one woman, which is theoretical- 
ly to inspire two lives, and is to double the 
happiness and power of each member of the 
deep and imperishable contract. At times 
the Athenians derided the orator who, for so 
many years, idolized the one woman, and who 
made an equal of a supposed inferior, but the 
generations coming into the world long after 
the Athenian mob had ceased to mock, feel 
that Pericles uttered a significant thought 
when he said, in dying, "Athens entrusted 
her greatness, and Aspasia her happiness to 
me" — true to public duty and private love. 
With painful slowness did the human fam- 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 153 

ily learn its lessons of affection. Whether 
we think of the bonds that should attach parent 
to child or adult children to aged parents, or 
husband and wife to each other, we see in each 
direction that mankind has studied with great 
reluctance and with great negligence the rela- 
tions of heart to heart. 

The coming historian in this department of 
human experience will, if he writes justly, de- 
vote a long chapter to the influence of Chris- 
tianity upon the quality of this sentiment. 
Christianity proper — that is, considered apart 
from Judaism and from accidental facts seen 
along its path, must be confessed to have done 
much toward spiritualizing the attachment be- 
tween man and woman, much toward incul- 
cating the idea of a relation of a high charac- 
ter between two souls, and toward establishing 
the principle that this friendship must last as 
long as life lasts. One of the most divine of 
Christ's teachings is his estimate of love. No 



154: CLUB ESSAYS. 



one so removed it from the lowness and coarse- 
ness of the street, and no one up to his day 
pointed out better the delicate shadings of its 
color. Had he spoken in the language of our 
time, or in such details as we find in the essay- 
ist and the novelist of the high school, what 
hot words he would have spoken against those 
who occupy street corners and crossings, and 
even stand at the gates of churches and thea- 
ters, that they may make a libertine's feast out 
of the beauty of the noble wives and daugh- 
ters who may be passing and re-passing at such 
public doors ! But Christ could utter only 
general truths, but truths they were which 
helped sweep away the degradation of woman 
and the less honorable thoughts and alliances 
of man. Awakened by a soul so pure, and 
aided by such an organizer as the church, 
which decreed the permanency of marriage, 
love began to put on its rich garments and to 
walk a queen. Homance and poetry and the 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 155 

drama took up the general theory that the 
heart can love but once, and that in the ad- 
vance of that attachment there is a paradise — 
beyond its tomb all is a desert. Even the 
songs of Burns rise above his actual life and 
sing the new theory in the verses to Mary in 
Heaven. The practice of an age is always in- 
ferior to its ideal, and hence individuals here 
and there enter into second and third and 
fourth marriages when death has come to ter- 
minate an association ; but the high standard 
society has reached in its fundamental thought 
may be learned from every drama and poem 
and song of the heart. Even Byron felt the 
power and elegance of this public ideal, when, 
in his deep contempt for transient beauties, he 
had to sigh out the longing for one fair spirit 
for a minister, 

"That he might all forget the human race, 
And hating no one, love but only her." 

From Dante to Tennyson this highest form 



156 CLUB ESSAYS. 



of human attachment has been pictured as ex- 
isting between two only, and as undying. 
Beatrice in her purity, and Francesca in her 
error and disgrace, join with the later Juliet 
and Ophelia in a beautiful advocacy of the 
dream that these partnerships of the soul are 
made in heaven, and involve mortals like the 
toils of a sweet, resistless fate. In modern 
romantic literature, the ideal lover, male or 
female, is the one who, amid the severest trials, 
stands most unshaken, and who comes from 
the furnace only a purer metal. Even such 
sentimental songs as those of Tom Moore 
carry the reader's best judgment whenever the 
verses convey the idea that 

"Through the furnace unflinching, thy way I'll pursue, 
And guard thee, and save thee, or perish there, too." 

The recent progress in the education of 
woman is destined to mark a great progress in 
the career of the matrimonial idea. This 
higher intellectual culture makes woman a 



THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 157 

companion for man, however eminent he may 
become by his study and his profession; and 
this equality of greatness will compel a devo- 
tion, which was once ephemeral and largely 
physical, to become a sympathy as well of 
mind with mind. The pathetic attachment 
of John Stuart Mill to his wife, and of the 
Brownings to each other, are only visible 
proofs that the men and women of the present 
age are carrying on a business in courtships and 
marriages far more honorable and far happier 
than were affairs of the heart, when the earth 
was peopled by Greeks and Eomans and Medes 
and Persians. And out of the study of this 
coming history of a reformed sentiment and 
practice, there may come to the next genera- 
tion of young persons a wisdom which will 
lay in deep reason the foundations of mar- 
riage, which will shun the rocks of a thought- 
less fancy, and the yet more dangerous risks 
of a mere temporary passion which, in a few 



15S CLUB ESSAYS. 



months, dies, as pass away the attachments of 
brutes. The ideal day will approach when 
the young man's love of some equal in wis- 
dom, but superior in beauty of mind and 
body, and in all the forms of taste and tender- 
ness, will be for many years an inspiration of 
each morning and evening, as it may come in 
gladness or in depression. The love of money 
and of fame will be humble impulses com- 
pared with the desire to make happy the one 
companion of the heart, who has left home, 
even the infinite devotion of her mother, to 
find, under another's roof, the care which will 
rival the mother's solicitude, and to hear from 
other lips words of praise and esteem, which 
the tomb will prevent the mother from speak- 
ing always to her idolized child. 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 

As the .greatest quality of man is not his 
form nor his swiftness nor his strength nor his 
power to accumulate property, but is his ideas 
and sentiments, so that will be the greatest 
art which shall express the most of this great- 
ness of man. To measure the fine arts one 
must ask which one can best express the 
most thoughts and feelings, and the greatest 
thoughts and feelings? And the answer will 
determine upon what forehead the laurels 
must be placed. In the German story of 
"Love Without Words," by Musseus, the 
value of that gateway of the soul, which is 
called language, becomes painfully evident, 
for the lovers, daring only to see each other, 
and at long distance, and forbidden to resort 
to that precious go-between and mediator 
11 (161) 



162 CLUB ESSAYS. 



called a love-letter, could make no progress, 
except a progress of melancholy, by all the 
other arts known to human genius. Music 
failed, flowers failed, sighs failed, architecture 
and sculpture failed, and, doubtless, both lov- 
ers would have died of suppressed poetry and 
affection, had not Franz found the altar where 
Meta was accustomed to say her prayers, and 
had he not hung there a card with these 
words: "A. young man, going into a far 
country to make a fortune, asks you to pray 
for his success and return." These words 
swept over Meta's heart as no music or paint- 
ing or sculpture could have touched it, for they 
contained a rich group of ideas — love, sacred 
love, house-building love; love so deep that it 
prayed, and a love that was bound to come 
back to the presence of Meta. All the other 
fine arts were eclipsed the moment words be- 
gan their eloquence. 

But what kind of words are those which 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 163 

make up this fine art? The air of earth is 
constantly disturbed by human voices. There 
is no scarcity of noisy prattlers in car and 
omnibus; no dearth of preaching men and 
women in pulpit ; no dearth of sand-lot ora- 
tors ; no poverty of campaign speakers and 
law-makers; no famine of theological and 
biological, and chemical, and etymological, 
and paleographic, and medical talk; but, are 
these organized vowels and consonants when 
printed in a volume, the whole or parts of that 
uttered soul that is honored by being called 
Art? Evidently they are not the whole nor a 
part. While many, indeed most, of the great 
terms in use refuse to be closely defined, while 
no one can tell us what is poetry, what is elo- 
quence, what is virtue, what is religion or 
what beauty may be, yet there can be made 
approximative analyses which will serve for 
everyday use amid a multitude which never 
hopes for a perfect comprehension of even its 



164: CLUB ESSAYS, 



dearest truths. A world which cannot define 
its God, or its life or death or heaven or hell, 
may well yield gracefully when anyone asks 
it, What is literature? or, What is poetry? 
Coleridge himself did not close up the debate 
over the term poetry. He passed over a wide 
field of labor and research, and taught man- 
kind that such word-work as that of Job and 
Isaiah is not poetry, but it is the poetic; it is 
the raw material out of which poetry might be 
made. As a cotton boll is not muslin, nor 
calico, but stands as the prime cause, and as 
the field of flax is not a j^ece of linen, as the 
cotton-boll and the stock of flax wait for the 
manufacturer to come along, so the thoughts 
of Job and St. John and Ossian and Hugo 
are not poetry, but they are the material of 
the fabric in waiting for a manufacturer; and 
only he is the full and true poet who, in one 
soul, both grows the blue blossomed flax and 
spins and weaves the linen. In such defini- 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 165 

tion the after ages would have found rest and 
faith had not such disturbers of sleep as John 
Ruskin come along to show that all the follow- 
ers of Coleridge were exchanging the substance 
for the accident; were finding Minerva not in 
her heart and soul, but in her sandals, and 
scarf, and shield. 

No one has defined eloquence. It is not 
very probable that the word "literature" will 
ever become so bounded and measured and 
mapped that at last all will say that they per- 
ceive the thing in its essence. The bounda- 
ries in the intellectual world are all dim. As 
no one can determine just when a domestic art 
becomes a fine art, just when a house-builder 
becomes an architect, just when a carpenter 
may be called an artist in wood-work, so in 
this matter of written truth or thought it is 
difficult to mark the place where a writer in 
his closet ceases to be a scribe and becomes a 
man of letters — an heir of this higher immor- 



166 CLUB ESSAYS. 



tality. The transition period is as obscure as 
that line the Calvinists used to sing of as 
running 

"Between God's mercy and His wrath." 

But, standing before a bough of apple 
blossoms, we can make general remarks about 
the coloring, although unable to tell where 
the pink or white absolutely comes or utterly 
goes away. We are perfectly composed in the 
belief that those blossoms are not black or 
green, or at all like unto the hue of the sun- 
flower or the flag. In many worlds beside 
the one seen by Darwin, we must confess to 
the fact of "missing links." Between mau 
and the ape there is a void; between literature 
and the common book there is a similar "ach- 
ing void." 

One will utter all the truth one has, and as 
much as the world deserves, should one say 
that literature is that part of thought that is 
wrought out in the name of the beautiful. A 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 107 

Blue-Book, an encyclopedia, a scientific trea- 
tise, a text book, a sectarian tract in religion 
or politics, is issued in the name of utility or 
fact or self interest; but a poem, like that of 
Homer, or an essay upon Milton or Dante or 
Caesar from a Macaulay, a Taine or a Froude, 
is created in the name of beauty, and is a 
fragment in literature, just as a Corinthian 
capital is a fragment in art. When truth, in 
its forward flow, joins beauty, the two rivers 
make a new flood called " Letters." Tt is an 
Amazon of broad bosom, resembling the sea. 
But beauty is a sentiment, a feeling, and hence 
all literature is sentimental. Knowledge, sci- 
ence, religious dicta, are cold; literature is 
warm. It is the tropical zone — all else is 
arctic. Knowledge, in all its forms, is the 
marble in the quarry, or dragged upon sledges 
a little way from the primeval mud. Litera- 
ture is the subsequent statue, full of all grace 
and snow-white in purity. Truth is the rude 



168 CLUB ESSAYS. 



tusk of the mammoth — letters the polished 
ivory, the decus, which Virgil says labor adds 
to the ivory : 

Quale inarms addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo 
Argenturn Pariusve lapis circumdatur auro. 

Not necessarily, perhaps, but as an existing 
fact, almost all the decoration which is seen in 
this temple under contemplation is made up 
of emotion. In all the long journey from 
Homer to Shakspeare, those passing along that 
path must all the while laugh or smile or sigh 
or weep. The common book-maker can sup- 
ply man with facts; the high, immortal word- 
weavers do not deal in facts, but in all the sad 
and happy experiences of the soul. Reading 
in the realm of this high art, we are like the 
travelers in the Canterbury Talcs, we must be 
in the emotional business of riding along in a 
magnificent company, having set forth from a 
Tabard Inn, and having our faces set toward 
Borne a Becket tomb, or merry or holy place; 



THE GREATEST OF TEE FINE ARTS. 169 

and, higher than the larks above the head, 
whose song is up in the sky, must be the 
heart-beats in our bosoms as we go. 

" Befelle that in that season on a day 
In Southwork, at the Tabard as I lay, 
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage 
At night was come into that hostelrie 
Wei nine and twenty in a compaynie 
Of Sundry folk. " 

Thus our English literature set out, not 
from an Alexandrian library, but from a 
goodly company of sundry folk; not from intel- 
lectual analysis and discrimination, but from 
the loving and laughing and weeping heart. 
Out of such clear mountain rills, all the 
streams of letters have made up their sweep- 
ing floods. Homer's "goodly company" did 
not assemble in a hotel but in a camp; and, 
instead of laughing along country roads, they 
sailed in ships, or marched in heavy columns, 
and by plume and shield and spear and char- 
iot and by heroic struggle, made up the verse 



170 CLUB ESSAYS. 



we call Homer — a flowing stream of love and 
hate, joy or bitterness. But human history 
is all one page. All that high art called 
" letters" rises in sentiment, and, arrayed in 
such vesture, it dies if stripped of its array, 
as the oak dies if stripped of its foliage. 

Look at the evidence of facts. Passing 
over the centuries which came and went before 
the Greeks, pause in that peninsula where 
there flashed forth a light which in our 19th 
century beams on quite undimmed. Select 
the first great work. Who wrote it ? Did 
it issue from a mind full of learning and spec- 
ulation and analysis? On the opposite, a poor 
blind man sang it along the streets. The 
book, Homer, is the exploits of the heart. 
Here Achilles and Agamemnon fought, but 
not over a question in science or politics, but 
over a piece of female beauty. Here Andro- 
mache and Hector kissed each other and their 
child, and parted. The infant boy 



TEE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 171 

'Smiled silently, Andromache all bathed 
In tears, stood by, and clinging to his hand 

Addressed him * * * ' Hast thou no pity then, 
For this, thine infant son and wretched me ? ' " 

This Hector is soon dragged around the 
outer walls, fastened by leathern thongs to the 
chariot of Achilles. In the Odyssey, Ulysses 
wanders in magic seas for twenty years; his 
son seeks him, his queen weeps. 

What volume is this ? We have come to 
Pindar — to harps and chariot races, and 
choruses and odes. All the splendor of the 
Olympic and Pythian games is lying in Pin- 
dar, just as the Summer Night's Dream lies 
in the English dramatist. The nearest 
humanity will ever come to beholding those 
games which once entranced Greece will be 
when the eye shall read this poet, and in his 
rapid measure and rapid thought, find again 
the rolling chariot and see the dust-cloud and 
hear the shout. 

iEschylus follows, with that form of passion 



172 CLUB ESSAYS. 



called Prometheus. Sophocles follows, leading 
by the hand the first ideal sister — a woman 
never before seen in art, a woman not even in 
the Bible — the almost sublime Antigone. Eu- 
ripides follows, with that Medea, which still 
comes and goes on the stage as often as a 
Rachel is born with the genius that can grap- 
ple with such a creation, Sappho comes only 
to add to this torrent of passion. Being 
neither a statesman, nor a scholar, nor a sci- 
entist, but only a girl, she has been borne 
along twenty-five hundred years by the winds 
of sentiment. What this girl's own estimate 
of literary qualification really was, we may 
learn from her own verses, for in one of her 
poems it is seen at once that she makes educa- 
tion consist in a refined sensibility. In her 
highly-strung girlhood, she had, upon a cer- 
tain day, been fated to walk with an untaught 
woman, and the dcadncss of the woman's 
mind and heart drove the poetess to her pen, 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 173 

that she might unload her soul of its mingled 
hate and pity: 

TO AN ILLITERATE WOMAN. 

Unknown, unheeded shalt thou die, 

And no memorial shall proclaim 
That once beneath the upper sky 

Thou hadst a being or a name. 

Doomed o'er that dreary realm alone, 

Shunned by all gentle shades to go, 
No friend shall soothe, nor parent own 

Thee! child of sloth! the Muses' foe! 

For never to the Muses' bowers 

Did'st thou with glowing heart repair, 
Nor ever intertwine the flowers 

That Fancy strews unnumbered there. 

Thus, through Sappho are we taught that 
literature is an art, because its urns are all 
full of sentiment. She reveals the supreme 
power of emotion. Her own genius is that of 
sensibility, for in her eulogy upon the rose 
she is seen as with eyes full of tears, standing 
in her garden in Mitylene. Toward lover and 



174: CLUB ESSAYS. 



rose her feelings moved in the impetuosity of a 
storm. 

Plato, that confessed princa of old thinkers, 
served as a poet long before he served as a 
philosopher. It looks as though his reflection 
had been shot into the world by the arrows of 
fancy, as Apollo comes in the beams of the 
sun. Much of his greatness took its rise in 
Mt. Helicon. Passion aroused the soul which 
afterward thought so deeply, and the reader 
has still his doubtful choice between the prose 
and the poetry of this greatest of the ancients. 
Great in music, and painting, and verse, and 
philosophy, the fathers called him a Christian, 
because his meaning was so hidden behind 
images that he was all things to all times. 
Like the mother of iEneas, he advanced in a 
concealing cloud. 

The Latins repeat this phenomenon of their 
Attic companions, for the Latin authors which 
must charm the world are those who speak 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 175 

from the manifold affections — Virgil and 
Horace and Ovid and Terence and Lucre- 
tius — all the most powerful of Roman names, 
but all they composed was written down at 
the command of loye and hate, happiness and 
sorrow. It is a singular attribute of human 
nature that it would rather hear of the "wide- 
spreading beech" of Virgil than read the 
tables of the Roman law, and would rather 
cry out, "Eureka! eureka!" over a bunch of 
wild flowers than over the idea that the square 
of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is 
equivalent to the sum of the squares of the other 
two sides. "We all believe the utterances of 
geometry. We do not entertain any doubt over 
the assertion that if two straight lines intersect 
each other the angles which have their heads 
together will be equal. Upon the whole, men 
are glad that Pythagorus and Euclid discovered 
the equality of such quantities so located, but 
the same men prefer to see iEneas and Dido 



176 CLUB ESSAYS. 



in their tete a tete at Carthage, and prefer the 
fourth book of Virgil to any fourth book of 
geometric lore. 

Having observed that ancient Rome was 
moved more by men of sentiment than by men 
of erudition, and that Virgil is more im- 
mortal in his verses than Xuma Pompilius 
in his law, or Julius in his circle of the months, 
we may note that more recent Rome and Flor- 
ence appealed again to that beauty which lays 
the foundation of all art. Perhaps that hu- 
man nature which changes so readily its gov- 
ernment and religion and language and cos- 
tume will be found at last demanding changes 
in the essence of its literature. The past bav- 
ins: made such a Ions: and large offering of 
tears and smiles and pensiveness and wit and 
beauty, why should not the public reverse its 
order and Bay: "Give us the facts; give us 
information." Let us see. In the thirteenth 
century, when the intellectual world was lying 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. ITT 

dead, stretching out like a black forest, where 
now and then a group of ascetic monks could 
be seen moving along in poverty, like a pack 
of hungry wolves crossing at midnight a field 
of ice — there, where language lay shattered 
and was neither the Latin of the past nor the 
Italian of the future, a beautiful girl lifted up 
her divine form slowly, and around her white 
forehead a lover came and wove a new lan- 
guage. Literature was raised from the dead 
by two lovers. No other kind of mortal had 
life to spare, nor the beauty that could endow 
an art. Dante and Beatrice warmed up a 
language and epoch by the glow of their 
own passion. Dante was the most fully 
awakened mind of his century, but his 
awakening was not that of only learning, but 
also of romance. Here the world's thought 
began to roll back to it, not, however, by the 
gate of information, but by the gate of senti- 
ment. Intellectual life had been absent for a 
12 



178 :lub essays. 



thousand years. A night had reached out 
from the fourth century to the thirteenth, and 
now, when light begins to dawn, its nimbus is 
first seen about the brows of only two — two 
Florentine children. "Where were the philos- 
ophers and the statesmen? Indeed, they were 
waiting for a fine art to come and wake their 
sluggish souls. As Homer arose in advance 
of the seven wise men and was compelled to 
sing and dance by their couches, and beat hi s 
castanets and sweep his whole hand over his 
harp before Wisdom and Learning would so 
much as turn their heavy heads on their pil- 
lows, so Dante and his maiden were com- 
pelled to pass through the long halls of the old 
intellectual caravanserai and tap with love- 
fingers on the doors before the <riants of brain 
would know that the sun was up and was her- 
alding a large day for the world. And after all 
that noise in the hall, the first men to awake 
were not the men of science and religion, but 



TEE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 179 

the BafFaelles and the Angelos of art. This his- 
tory all repeats itself in the more modern times. 
In English thought first came Chaucer. The 
romance which founded the Greek and Italian 
languages founded our great tongue. Chaucer 
came in the name of the beautiful — in the name 
of the beautiful alone. Man changes his gov- 
ernment and his language and his fashions, but 
he always comes back to the fields and flowers 
and song, and to the adventures of the heart. 
Shakspeare followed with a continuation of 
human emotion. The world desiring to have 
a collection of great national books, said: "My 
gifted children, bring sentiment. Let others 
bring facts and make Blue Books and Statis- 
tics; you must bring pictures and music in 
words. 'Manibus date lilia plenis.' Your 
thought and utterances must 

" ' Come o'er my ear like the Sweet South 
That breathes upon a bank of violets 
Stealing and giving odor.' " 

What a line of sentimentalists have followed 



180 CLUB ESSAYS. 



this Shakspeare! They reach out like Aurora- 
beams from Chaucer to Tennyson, while in the 
German plains we see Goethe and Schiller par- 
allel rivers of dignified sensation. 

Out of this infinite power of the heart it has 
come to pass that souls without great acquisi- 
tion have risen to endless fame, and have com- 
posed works so amazing that men of books, 
inflamed by the aphorism that " knowledge is 
power/' have attempted to find in a Lord 
Bacon an adequate source of Hamlet and 
Juliet. A recent writer says: "Are we to 
suppose that those plays sprang from the brain 
of one who was only a playwright? One who 
had only held horses and had poached for 
deer?" Of a truth we are, for much good has 
come from car} liters and playwrights and 
shepherds and railsplitters, and all that form 
of humanity, and much of this good has been 
of such a quality that the touch of a Lord 
Bacon would have taken away all the velvet 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 181 

finish of the whole fabric. That Shakspeare 
stole many skeletons of plays is certain, but he 
did that in an age when authorship was not 
so glorious as the dramatic action. The ques- 
tion was not who could compose a play, but who 
could present it to the public. Shakspeare 
seized upon the common property of the stage, 
and when a drama did not suit his powerful 
judgment he re-fashioned it, and fortunately 
each amendment was a progress. There are 
no masses of knowledge visible in these plays, 
such that the giants of learning must be 
thought to have heaped up the Pelion and 
Ossa, for the real truth is that a common plow- 
man of that period held all the law and gospel 
one may find in all these comedies and trage- 
dies, for it is perfectly plain that in making 
up the religious element in such writers as 
Byron and Scott and Shakspeare, a little 
Scripture will go a long way. When, how- 
ever, it comes to all that eloquence of the heart, 



182 CLUB ESSAYS. 



which we find in Romeo and Juliet and the 
Merchant of Venice, that William needed 
Lord Bacon no more than Burns needed help 
from Burke and Pitt while he was composing 
his Highland Mary. The thoughts springing 
up from the Misses Davidson and the Misses 
Carey, even the love songs of Sappho and the 
Infelicia of the humble Adah Menken, teach 
beyond doubt that the human mind enjoys 
two forms of greatness — the one acquisition, 
the other creation — and that while some men 
are made, others are born. 

A fine art being therefore an industry which 
works in the beautiful, literature is a fine art, 
because it culls out and properly arranges and 
forms into certain wholes the attractive in 
thought. What painting attempts to express 
by color, what music would achieve with 
sound, it does by help of vowels and conso- 
nants; but it far surpasses its companions, 
because it can utter the mind and soul most 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 183 

fully. But tliis virtue should not make it too 
vast to be an art. Instances have already 
been brought forward to show that very much 
of what the world calls literature, is made up 
of the record of sentiment. These books are 
all galleries of pictures, and the Sistine 
Chapel and Dante are similar human works, 
only the decorator of the chapel used literal 
paint; the decorator of the Divine Comedia 
used those better colors called verse and im- 
agination and fancy. Macaulay was an ar- 
tist; his essays and his histories are the works 
which remain from his chisel, or brush. Our 
best statue of John Bunyan is from the stu- 
dio of Macaulay. In this art, we must there- 
fore always expect that truth will be highly 
colored. We are never deeply impressed with 
the exact fact. The mind is a convex glass 
which magnifies each object. As Angelo 
made his Moses colossal, so the men and 
women in letters are either transformed or 



1S4 CLUB ESSAYS. 



belittled, until the mind becomes fully im- 
pressed with the virtues or vices which may 
attach to the personages. In the recent 
"Caesar" of Mr. Froude, you perceive in the 
outset that the Roman is destined to become 
higher and broader than his age. Unless this 
Julius of Mr. Froude is to be larger than all 
former estimates of him, what reason exists 
why the world should add to its libraries that 
additional piece of biography? Angelo, when 
he conceived the idea of producing a "Moses," 
sought a block of marble having a height of 
eighteen feet. In planning his work, Mr. 
Froude must have said: "My Caesar shall 
stand eighteen feet high in his sandals." We 
are not thus deceived and victimized by these 
books. Man is naturally so stupid, that lie 
must be amazed before he will wake up and 
sec anything. It is only when the Macau- 
lays and the Lamartines and the Dantes and 
Elomers come along, that the human family 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 185 

will really confess that there is anything of 
value or of beauty taking place in the world. 

As Froude's Csesar is a recent, as well as a 
good illustration of literature, as an art we 
may as well mark in it the traces of the artist. 
You survey there the Roman world of Caesar's 
epoch. Those circumstances which would 
seem to call for a man of genius and will are 
set top ilier in such a manner that if a Julius 
does not come up out of them, it would seem 
an oversight on the part of that Providence 
who governs all large combinations of chemi- 
cal and spiritual forces. The tumultuous bar- 
barian hordes liable in any year to assail that 
citadel of civilization where Virgil and Horace 
desire to sing in peace — the j)irates which were 
swarming all over the Mediterranean in such 
numbers that merchant-ships were compelled 
to sail in fleets or rot in the docks, the revolu- 
tionists who were producing too many Cata- 
lines, the rival maritime states — all are so set 



186 CLUB ESSAYS. 



forth in the " Sketch " of Mr. Fronde, that 
the reader of ordinary sensibility finds him- 
self wishing that Caesar would hasten to rush 
in upon that scene. To some extent the wish 
is unjust. Pompey could have met the emer- 
gency. Brutus could have transacted the pub- 
lic business. But the painting is true in its 
great outlines, and while Caesar was not the 
only man of the period, he was a profoundly 
great man, and that book is of worth which 
thus arouses the reader until he sees with great 
distinctness many great facts in a great age. 
The book awakens one like a band of music 
or the firing of heavy guns. 

Mr. Froude does, however, permit his pas- 
sion as an artist to carry him too far. There 
is a limit to this eloquence of favoritism. It 
may be very difficult to find this limit, but 
when a historian, in his desire to show well 
his special subject, belittles the cotemporaries 
of his hero, he has stepped down from his 



THE GREATEST OF THE FIXE ARTS. 187 

high, art, to wear for a time the soiled robes of 
a partisan. Some of the old painters were 
wont to resort to contrast, and when they 
painted a Madonna or a Cecilia, they placed 
some imp or devil in the background, evi- 
dently to enhance the Madonna or Cecilia by 
comparison. This comparative devil the great- 
est artist omitted, and hence Angelo does not 
attempt to make Moses greater by giving us 
some Aaron, with an injured nose and eyes 
asquint. In the midst of his collection of 
striking pictures, Mr. Fronde places Cicero as 
the background by which to bring out the one 
Caesar in fine relief. When common adjec- 
tives fail, the distinguished writer seems to 
say: "I will belittle Cicero for a time and that 
will make my subject seem a Colossus." The 
vanity of Cicero is made too very visible — 
the state of mind which could say: "Fear 
not, you carry Caesar;" "The wife of Caesar 
must be above suspicion" — that towering self- 



188 CLUB ESSAYS. 



conceit which could claim a direct descent 
from Venus and Anchises, is made to disap- 
pear, and the open-hearted boasting of a re- 
fined civilian is made to be a deformity of the 
period which the great Julius escaped. 

Mr. Froude passes beyond the lawful exag- 
geration of an art, also, when he attempts to 
make Caesar bear some religious resemblance 
to certain great Englishmen, now living on 
the island. Buckle and Huxley and Spencer 
and their schools do, indeed, compose a coterie 
of great minds. Were they to lead armies to 
battle, they would probably not trouble Heaven 
with any prayers for victory. But no literary 
art can initiate Julius into such a rational- 
istic, self-poised order. The man who labored 
hard to be made high priest of Borne ; the 
mind which saw a ball of fire descend to light 
him to victory ; the Roman who watched upon 
what hand his pigeons would fly on the morn- 
ing of the Ides of March ; the husband that 



THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 189 

felt troubled over his wife's bad dream — is not 
the man to be crowned with the calm intellect 
and heroic submission of a Stuart Mill. Aside 
from these two or more instances, in which his 
art has passed beyond legitimate bounds, Mr. 
Froude's Caesar is one of the most artistic and 
powerful books of our powerful age. It joins 
with the literary creations of all times in pro- 
claiming the fact that all the other fine arts, 
separate or combined, are feeble of speech 
compared with literature. It can express all 
the sentiments and thoughts of man. Paint- 
ing or sculpture or music is only a window, 
through which some few beams of light pour 
in upon the imprisoned mind, or by which the 
imprisoned mind looks out; but literature is 
the removal of all the walls that confine. It 
is the leading forth of the soul into a great 
June day in a great world, with the attending 
benediction: u Go where you will, all truth 
and sentiment are before your footstep." 



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